Your store outgrew Wix. Here is what moving actually involves

Good reasons are structural: you need wholesale pricing per customer, subscriptions with your own rules, product options the builder cannot model, a catalogue larger than the platform handles comfortably, an integration with your accounting or warehouse system, or content and SEO control you keep bumping into. Bad reasons are cosmetic. If the complaint is that the site looks dated or converts poorly, a redesign inside the current platform is usually cheaper and faster, and you can always move later with a design you have already proven. Be honest about which one you have before committing to a migration.

• Selling rules the platform cannot express
• A catalogue or content volume you have outgrown
• An integration that does not exist and will not
• Not: it looks dated — that is a redesign, not a migration

Products, categories, images, descriptions, prices and stock levels export and import with reasonable reliability, though variants and product options usually need manual mapping because every platform models them differently. Customer records transfer, but passwords never do — they are stored hashed and cannot be moved, so every customer will need a reset, and that email needs planning rather than sending itself at three in the morning. Order history can be imported for reference; historical order data rarely round-trips perfectly and is often better exported to a spreadsheet you keep than forced into the new system.

Your theme and page designs do not move — the new storefront is a build, not a copy. Any app you added inside the builder has no equivalent to import; you will find a WooCommerce plugin that does something similar and configure it from scratch. Reviews depend entirely on where they live: if a third-party service holds them, they usually come across, and if the platform holds them, they may not. Anything built with the builder's proprietary blocks or automations is a rebuild, and pricing that out honestly is part of the decision.

This is the part that decides whether the move costs you a quarter of revenue. Website builders use their own URL patterns for products and categories, and WooCommerce uses different ones. Every changed URL needs a 301 redirect mapped before launch, not discovered afterwards from a rising 404 count. Export the full list of live URLs first, decide the new structure deliberately, build the redirect map as a spreadsheet, and verify it on staging. Doing this properly is the single highest-value hour in the whole project — redesign without losing SEO covers the same discipline in more depth.

• Export every live URL before you change anything
• Map old to new one by one — no wildcard hand-waving
• Test redirects on staging, then again after go-live
• Watch Search Console coverage daily for two weeks after

This is the trade nobody mentions in the migration guides. A website builder includes hosting, updates, security patching and uptime in its monthly fee. WooCommerce does not: those become your responsibility, either as your time or as someone's invoice. In exchange you get to own the data, the checkout and the code, with no platform commission on your revenue and no rule changes imposed on you. That is a genuinely good trade for a store with volume and someone to own the maintenance, and a bad one for a store with neither — what a WooCommerce store costs to run is the honest ledger.

Build and populate the new store on a staging URL while the current one keeps selling. Test checkout with real transactions and real refunds, not test mode alone. Freeze catalogue changes for a short window, run the final product and customer sync, switch DNS during your quietest hours, and keep the old platform paid for a month rather than cancelling on day one. On the day itself, verify order emails, payment webhooks and analytics events specifically — those three are the ones that most often stay quietly broken after an otherwise successful move.

If your store is under a hundred orders a month, has no unusual selling rules and nobody in the business wants to own updates, staying where you are is a defensible decision, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling a project. Equally, if the real complaint is conversion rather than capability, fix the buying path first and measure it — a slow, confusing store migrates into a slow, confusing store on new infrastructure. The platform choice questions page is designed to talk you out of a move you do not need.