Why I moved from wix to wordpress…

Hi everyone!

Today I am going to write about why I moved from wix to wordpress and how you can do the same if you are currently using wix for your website/blog!

So, I had been using wix for two years, before I decided to switch to wordpress. To be honest, I actually liked wix. Not only was it really easy to use (literally just drag and drop) into your website, but also I liked how my website looked.

However, since January of 2020, I realised that there were a few things that I didn’t like about Wix.

The first one was that my blogs were not showing up in google and with wix, SEO doesn’t actually work very well, so your posts do not get shown onto search engines.

Additionally, I was annoyed that with the ‘new wix blog’ people could only comment on my blogs if they were ‘members’ and had to sign in. Wix got rid of all my old comments, which was so upsetting as I had quite a few comments on my posts by then, but the final straw was when wix stopped people from being able to comment on my blogs. I had had this issue since January and had been sending wix support emails every day pretty much. Sometimes they would respond, sometimes they wouldn’t. But if they did respond, it was always the same answer. ‘We’ll get back to you soon once we have resolved the issue.’ But they never did get back to me and it was never quick either. Fastforward to April, where I was still having this continuous issue with comments on my blog and that’s when I decided to take some action myself… I realised that it was one thing to ONLY allow ‘members’ to comment on my blog posts, but another to not even allow these ‘members’ to comment after there was this on-going issue with commenting.

So, I switched to wordpress. And honestly I couldn’t be happier. It’s not even that difficult to set up a new website with wordpress, although it takes a while to get used to the ‘customizer’ section which is so different to wix! But the reader section is amazing – you can find so many new blogs to read and people can follow your page! As well, there are SO many more stats and insights into how your posts perform compared to wix that it is actually mind-blowing!

If you are currently using wix, then I recommend you switch to WordPress, and if you need any help with creating your new website, then just let me know and I would be more than happy to help you out *even though really I’m new to all this too! If you are contemplating starting a blog and don’t know which website designer/platform to use, I also couldn’t recommend wordpress enough (although you may want to look into whether you want to use .com or .org!)

HOW TO SWITCH FROM WIX TO WORDPRESS? CAN YOU TRANSFER ALL YOUR DATA ACROSS EASILY?

It’s really not as simple as it seems. I mean, I had read SO many articles online, watched a couple hundred YouTube videos on the procedure and still had no clue how to go about transferring 60 odd blogs onto a new WordPress one. I did find one super informative and useful youtube video which I will link here If you want to watch it – it made the process look easy, but is unfortunately only really useful if you want to have a wordpress blog that is a premium business one (paid for) as it includes plugins which you can install. Additionally, if you use wordpress.org or plan on having another premium setting then it should be easy to transfer all your data across or hire a wordpress expert (as a part of your paid plan) to transfer all your data across for you.

However, if you are like me and plan on using either a free WordPress blog or a ‘personal’ premium one (which is the one I have) then you will soon realise that it is so much harder than you ever thought possible to move all your blogs and data across.

1) You could go to ‘import’ on the ‘tools’ section of the WordPress dashboard. This is honestly such an easy way to transfer ALL your data from wix over to your new site, including all your blogs. HOWEVER, there is a major flaw in using this ‘import’ tool. I used it and it was a huge mistake. As someone who had over 60 blogs on wix, all my blogs were successfully transferred over, but then I couldn’t edit them and trust me when I say that the layout was awful. I had to then put all 67 of these blogs into the ‘trash’ section on the blog and it took WAY too long. So, I only really recommend this for people who do not have many blogs over on wix already, as it means that if the import does not go to plan, then your website can still be changed!

2) You could start again. This is what I eventually ended up doing as there was just no way that it was working for me! I had to choose a theme on WordPress (I couldn’t recommend ‘dara’ more as it was super easy to use and I can change the background colours and fonts!) Then, set up your website by using widgets and checking the editing page and customizer. The process is really simple once your get your head around how to use the WordPress settings! Then once you have made your new website you need to manually write up all your old blogs and upload them to your page. I know, annoying right? Especially if like me, you had lots of blogs over on wix. It takes a while, but it is 100% worth it at the end (even if you lose all your previous stats.)

What I really recommend is that if you are a new blogger or are thinking of starting a blog, that you use wordPress. With over 30% of all the websites on search engines powered by wordpress, it’s really no surprise that WordPress is undeniably one of the best platforms to use for blogging.

The choice is yours, but I think this blog is clear in voicing my views! For all wix users currently struggling to make sense of how to transfer all your work over to wordpress, I really recommend that you buy a ‘business’ premium plan if you want to transfer all your data across or just start your page again. It may take you a long time to make your website if you start again (it took me about two weeks) but honestly it is so worth it.

Let me know if you have any questions! I would be more than happy to help. My Instagram is @bethlucyblogs so send me a message! I hope that you liked this post – please like and comment or share if you did! Thank you so much for reading and please subscribe to my page if you did like it or follow me!

Beth Lucy