Off the treadmill
WordPress to Framer migration
WordPress does give your content back — that part is solvable. What it also gives you is a host, a database, a login page, thirty-odd plugins and a weekly update queue. The content moves across. The maintenance does not come with it.
Plugins to maintain
34 → 3
Servers left to patch
0
On every old permalink
301
What actually has to happen
WordPress fails in its own particular ways, and none of them are the ones Webflow or Wix fail at. Six mechanisms, each running live below rather than described.
The plugin stack collapses
A working WordPress site is usually thirty-odd plugins, each with its own update cycle, its own settings page and its own way of breaking. Most of what they do is native in Framer, and most of the rest stops being a problem once there is no server. What is left is three real services.
The update treadmill stops
Core, theme and plugin updates arrive every week, and every so often one of them takes the site down at an inconvenient hour. There is nothing to update on the other side of the line.
Shortcodes unwrap
Page builder content is not text — it is text wrapped in layers of builder markup. Export it and you get the wrapper too. The sentence comes out; the wrapper does not.
Thin archives become one index
WordPress generates a page for every category, tag, author, month and pagination step, and most of them have nothing on them worth ranking. They consolidate into a single index with filters, and every old path keeps working through a 301.
Nothing left to log in to
wp-login.php is the most attacked URL on the internet. Without a database, an admin or a plugin, there is no longer anything on the other end of those attempts.
The export finally gets parsed
This is the part WordPress genuinely does better than Wix — the WXR file really does contain your posts, pages, media and custom fields. It gets parsed into a Framer CMS with fields you chose, and the item counts are checked against the original rather than assumed.
What happens to each part
Posts, pages, media, categories, tags and custom fields all come across from the WXR export — including ACF fields, which usually become proper CMS fields instead of the loose key-value pairs they were in wp_postmeta. Counts are checked against the live site rather than assumed.
What it costs to keep running
The build is a one-off. The running cost is not, and on WordPress it is the part nobody adds up. Hover any line to see it in the bar.
- Managed hosting$348
- Offsite backups$84
- Security and firewall$119
- Page builder licence$59
- SEO plugin$99
- Forms plugin$49
- Maintenance retainer$960
- Framer site plan$240
- Domain$14
Typical figures for a small business site, and every one of them is arguable. The retainer is the line that moves most — if nobody maintains your site today, subtract it and the gap is smaller.
How the move runs
Cutover
Every permalink and archive path is redirected, staging is diffed against the live site, DNS switches, and the host, the plugins and the retainer get cancelled last.
What the move costs
The export and audit comes first, because the post count and the plugin list decide the number. A fixed figure follows it — never an hourly rate before it.
Brochure site
$2,600
and up · under 20 pages
Little or no blog. Plugin audit, rebuild and full redirect map included.
Blog or magazine
$5,200
and up · hundreds of posts
Custom fields, archive consolidation and a redirect for every permalink.
WooCommerce
Quoted
after the plugin audit
A store is a replatform to Shopify as well as a migration. Scoped once we know what the plugins are actually doing.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, and WordPress is the most tractable of the three common migrations because it actually exports. The WXR file gives you posts, pages, custom fields and media, so the content transfer is a parsing job rather than a scraping job. The pages themselves are rebuilt, because exported builder markup is not something anyone can maintain afterwards.
All of them, with their titles, bodies, excerpts, featured images, categories, tags and publication dates. Custom fields come too, including ACF fields, which usually become proper Framer CMS fields rather than the loose key-value pairs they were in wp_postmeta.
Date-based permalinks like /2019/05/12/kitchen-refit/ become readable paths like /blog/kitchen-refit, and the old URL is carried by a 301. Category, tag, author and paginated archive pages usually collapse into a single index with filters, and each of those old paths gets a redirect too.
Framer has no built-in commerce, so a WooCommerce store is a replatform rather than a migration: products and checkout move to Shopify and Framer becomes the storefront. If Woo is running real orders today, treat it as a separate project with its own scope and budget.
No. There is no server, no database and no admin login, so caching, backup, firewall and anti-spam plugins all stop being relevant along with the things they were protecting. Hosting is included in the Framer plan. What you may still pay for are real services — analytics, email and scheduling.
They get rebuilt. Page builder content is stored wrapped in shortcodes or builder JSON, and exporting it produces markup nobody can edit. The text and images come across; the layout is built properly in Framer against a real design system.
Neither platform ranks for you. WordPress with Yoast gives you the fields; Framer gives you the same fields natively plus faster pages by default. The difference in practice is that a Framer site has no plugin conflicts, no render-blocking bundle from six plugins, and no theme update quietly changing your heading structure.
Send me the URL and your plugin list
A screenshot of your plugins page is honestly the fastest way to scope this. You get the post count, the redirect count, what each plugin becomes, and a fixed number — including the case where staying on WordPress is the right answer.