After 10 years on Wix, I'm leaving it for WordPress. (With the help of AI)

Note: You're not reading this on the new site. It hasn't launched yet. It's funny finally switching to the 'right' team." For years I have been in the WordPress community working with and for various people who would gasp when I mentioned I had a website on Wix, as if I'd said a swear word.

I don't blame them, I guess. For years I've heard Wix is slow or bad for SEO, but it served me very well. 

I go to the weekly Focus On Your Biz hangouts (huge thanks to Steph for hosting these) and a few years ago they were asking me why my website was on Wix, because they were discussing how WordPress can be intimidating to newcomers.

I tried to tip my toes into WordPress several times since I am a part of the community, but at the time, it just never clicked for me.

There were a few reasons I gave:

• I didn't know how to set up a domain or get my own hosting

• The concept of plugins intimidated me

• I was scared of breaking something

• There were too many options and no obvious place to start. Which theme? Which builder? 

  
  

(I do want to be clear, the Focus peeps have always been very supportive and welcomed my Wixness with open arms.)

For me, it was much easier to go to a platform like Wix where all this is just handled.

A couple of years ago at Atarim, I started getting access to the site to make simple changes here and there, but around this time last year we needed to create 50 new pages or so for our AI launch, which meant finally getting my hands dirty with WordPress. 

I was up for the challenge. (We used Elementor on the Atarim website, by the way.)

It didn’t take me long to get frustrated. What would take me 10 minutes to figure out in Elementor took only seconds in Wix, and part of that is because it was new to me, but some of it was because it was just more complicated for me to use. The more I worked with these tools the less interested I became in switching over.

I eventually got really good at Elementor, but it didn’t change my mind.

(This is no shade to Elementor. Elementor is run by some amazing people.)

So what changed my mind to switch?

Well, a few reasons started popping up over time: AI, Wix limitations, and the realization that I wanted more ownership of the site.

The more I started working on my website, the more I wanted the freedom everyone has that's building with AI. For example, on our new Atarim V5 site we have some really cool animations for our minimal mockups. There's just no way to do that within Wix.

And the ownership thing came to my mind after realizing wix is not doing very well and I want to be able to take my site anywhere. It's been explained to me that Wix is like owning an apartment. Everything I built lived inside someone else's system, and if I ever wanted to leave, I wasn't taking any of it with me. 

Ten years of work that I couldn't actually pick up and move. I wanted files I could hand to anyone, on any host, and have it just work.

I tested this when I started thinking about V2 of my site, and yeah, there is no way to take your code away from Wix.

I was really fascinated when Vito rebuilt our Atarim marketing site in Claude Design and moved it over to WordPress. 

Claude designs the pages (guided by Vito's years of experience and the knowledge of who we're serving).

And the Atarim Claude/Codex MCP allows Claude to reach into WordPress and transfer the pages over there.

I knew this is what I wanted for my site. I could work with AI with complete freedom, I had complete ownership of the HTML, and I could lose the baggage that came with Wix.

I screenshotted every page of my Wix site, fed them to Claude Design, and it did a first pass. I did give Claude some creative freedom to see if what it could produce would be better than my originals. 

I continued back and forth with Claude design for a few days and what I’ve ended up with is a beautiful version 2 of my website with little things here and there that never would have been possible on Wix.

The other night I started transferring the Claude Design over to WordPress and just watched in disbelief as the Atarim MCP reached into WordPress and built out every page for me. It added a page, created a custom HTML block, pasted the HTML from Claude design in, added the meta tags, social images, etc.

All while I was doing other things. I am so in love with this new way of working, I don’t think I will ever go back to a page builder.

Someone's going to tell me I'm not really using WordPress, and that's fine.

I'm not building layouts in the block editor or a page builder. I'm using WordPress for what I've always heard it's great at, which is owning and serving my content.

It handles my pages, my URLs, my media library, my sitemap. It decides what someone sees when they type in my domain. I just handed it HTML instead of dragging boxes around. (And the Custom HTML block is a core WordPress block, it ships in the box. So is the sitemap, no plugin required.)

Plus, I really want to use the plugin ecosphere. 

Best part: if I ever want to leave, I can take everything with me. Wix could never give me that.

Isn't the future so fun?

The site isn’t quite ready yet, but I should be good to go in the next few weeks.

I would loooove to hear what you think of my experience. Do you think WordPress needs to be more welcoming to newcomers (especially with its fallen market share) or do you think I wasn't giving it the chance it deserved?

Now to some questions I have anticipated. . .

If every page is one Custom HTML block, why keep WordPress at all? Why not static HTML on Cloudflare Pages or Netlify?

Correction: not every page is a Custom HTML block.

Just most of them are.

Anyway, I want to use the CRM that comes with WordPress and I want the plugin ecosystem. That's not something I get on a static host.

How do you change a single sentence? Do you have to go back to Claude every time?

Not necessarily.

Using Atarim, I can leave visual feedback on the page and then ask Atarim to make the change on the live page for me. I can also leave a bunch of comments in bulk, bring them into Claude, and push all the changes to the live site with one prompt with the Atarim MCP.

This is a very freeing way to work.

What about the header and footer? Are those theme, or baked into each page's HTML?

I'm using a custom theme I created. :)

Does SEO still work if the page is one block? Do Yoast and RankMath still read it?

I'm currently using Yoast and it works just fine.

Is it faster than Wix? Did you measure it?

Yes! I'm getting a significantly faster page speed score.

Where does the HTML live besides WordPress? If the database goes, do you still have your site?

The HTML lives in Claude, in WordPress, and I keep a copy of the site on my computer.

No matter what happens to those tools, I've got the HTML.

What happened to your Wix URLs and ten years of SEO? Did you map redirects?

I've been booked and busy for the last ten years, so the site has never gotten significant traffic. I'm fine with starting over.

Did you migrate the blog, or just pages?

All the blogs are carried over from the Wix site. You'll have to check it out when the new site launches. It's packed with golden nuggets about social media.

Forms, email, and everything else Wix bundled. What replaced it?

I'm using FluentCRM and Fluent Forms for these missing pieces.

To be honest, I'll miss everything being packed into one thing. But that's the trade off for complete ownership of the site and being able to work with AI on it.

How long did the whole move actually take?

Not as fast as I'd like.

People expect AI to be some magic pill that lets you rebuild a site in 2 or 3 days, but to be honest it took about as long as a traditional site would. That's because AI is just a tool like any other. It makes mistakes, you have to guide it, and there were changes I wanted to make along the way. Plus, I need to make sure it's truely ready.

What did it cost? Wix versus hosting plus whatever else you're paying for now?

Wix was $40 a month plus $8 a month for email, and form capabilities were included.

WordPress is $10 a month (they have a business plan for $40, but I don’t need it). I'm not paying for Fluent yet, but it looks like it'll be $60 a month.

Core blocks give you semantic structure for free. A blob of HTML doesn't. How did you handle headings, landmarks, focus states, keyboard nav, and alt text?

This was something I have been worried about.

When you hand a page to an AI and let it design, you can end up with a page that looks alright but reads terribly to a screen reader. Div soup you could say. Headings used because they were the right size instead of the right level. Buttons that are really just styled spans.

So I went through and checked it instead of assuming. That's part of the reason the new site is taking so long. I am trying to do this right.

You fed screenshots of your whole site to an AI. Any concern about that?

Not at all. 

The MCP has write access to your WordPress. What can it actually reach, and what can't it?

The Atarim MCP can make any change to your WordPress site that you can, but within your guardrails.

It'll ask for your approval before it does anything, and anything can easily be reverted. You can also use WordPress's own revision system.