H1: How to Migrate Your Website to WordPress in Pakistan — Complete Guide
Moving your website to WordPress is one of the most impactful digital decisions a Pakistani business can make. Done correctly, you gain full ownership, better SEO control, and the ability to manage your own content. Done incorrectly, you lose your Google rankings and months of accumulated search visibility.
This guide covers the migration process from the most common platforms: Wix, Squarespace, and custom HTML.
Before You Start: The Three Migration Rules
Rule 1: Preserve your URL structure where possible. Google has indexed your existing pages at specific URLs. If those URLs change without redirects, Google treats the new pages as new content, and your existing rankings disappear.
Rule 2: Set up 301 redirects for any URLs that must change. A 301 redirect tells Google that a page has permanently moved. Your ranking authority transfers to the new URL. Without redirects, you start from zero.
Rule 3: Do not change content and URL simultaneously. Changing a page’s URL and its content at the same time makes it impossible for Google to understand what happened. Change one at a time.
Migrating from a Custom HTML Site
Custom HTML sites are the easiest to migrate to WordPress because the URL structure is under your control.
1. Set up a fresh WordPress installation on your hosting (or on a staging domain)
2. Recreate each page in WordPress with the same URL slug as the original (e.g. /about/ stays /about/)
3. Copy your existing content into each page
4. Set up any pages with changed URLs using redirect plugins (Redirection is a free WordPress plugin)
5. Test every URL and confirm pages load correctly
6. Switch your domain DNS to point to the new WordPress hosting
7. Submit a new XML sitemap to Google Search Console
Migrating from Wix
Wix does not provide a clean WordPress export. This makes migration more labour-intensive.
Blog posts: Wix’s blog does not export to a WordPress-compatible format. Export options are limited. For blogs with many posts, a third-party migration service or manual recreation may be necessary.
Pages: Wix pages must be recreated manually in WordPress. There is no automatic content transfer.
URLs: Wix uses its own URL structure (typically /page-name). If your domain is moving to WordPress, you can recreate the same slugs and avoid redirects for most pages.
Practical recommendation: For most Wix migrations, treating the project as a new website build in WordPress — rather than a technical migration — produces the best result. Your existing content is recreated in a better format, not imported messily.
Migrating from Squarespace
Squarespace provides a WordPress-compatible XML export of your blog posts and pages. This is more useful than Wix’s export options but still requires cleanup.
1. In Squarespace: Settings → Advanced → Export → WordPress
2. In WordPress: Tools → Import → WordPress → upload the XML file
3. Review each imported page — formatting will need adjustment
4. Recreate custom page layouts in Elementor
5. Set up redirects for any changed URLs
Images from Squarespace need to be re-uploaded to WordPress — they do not transfer automatically.
The Most Important Post-Migration Step
After launching your WordPress site:
1. Open Google Search Console
2. Submit your new XML sitemap (yoursite.pk/sitemap_index.xml)
3. Use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for your most important pages
4. Monitor for crawl errors over the following 2 weeks
5. Check that rankings stabilise within 4–8 weeks of migration
Some short-term ranking fluctuation is normal during migration. If rankings have not recovered within 8 weeks, check for redirect issues, crawl errors, or missing meta tags.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will I lose my Google rankings when I migrate to WordPress?
You can migrate without losing rankings if done correctly. Key steps: maintain the same URL structure where possible, set up 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones where URLs change, and submit a new XML sitemap to Google Search Console after launch.
Can I migrate my Wix website to WordPress?
Yes, but Wix does not provide a direct WordPress export. Migrating from Wix typically involves manually recreating pages. For most Wix migrations, rebuilding the site in WordPress produces a better result than attempting a direct content transfer.