A Wix to WordPress migration with a significant cost saving. And a cunning Amelia setting manipulation to allow on-site payments.
David was referred to me via a colleague. His website was on Wix and he wanted to work on the SEO.
Wix was surprisingly expensive
David’s site was hosted with Wix and was due for renewal about 2 months after he contacted me. I knew that Wix had a free tier and the most basic plan is about $120 per year (there is a cheaper plan but it has Wix branding). David was on one of the business plans that gave him access to the powerful bookings platform. The renewal was going to cost around 400 euro! I suggested moving to a WordPress based site on hosting in Ireland and this would cost less than half the Wix price.
Migration plan
I created a staging site under one of my domains (I use WordPress Multisite to quickly create new sites) and copied his content over to it. I used GeneratePress Site Library to initialise the site design. The budget was tight and configuration would take most of the time.
The Wix bookings platform is quite powerful and have two way sync with his Google Calendar. The two way sync means that when David adds an entry on Google Calender that time is blocked off from the work calendar.
I purchased a license for Amelia booking plugin and copied over his existing bookings. I also configured Amelia for the various services he offered and the times, duration and cost for each. David created a Stripe account to accept payments. He then connected his Google Calendar as Amelia also features two way sync.
Just before his Wix subscription expired I purchased the Blacknight Mega hosting and began the domain transfer process.
Prime Mover plugin for migration
To move the data I used to export the subsite’s database tables and FTP the files to the new host. Last year my colleague (the same one that referred David to me) found a plugin called Prime Mover. Wow! The free version can export a subsite to a standalone site. You export the subsite to a package file that contains the database, uploaded files, themes and plugins.
On the destination standalone site I set up WordPress and the Prime Mover plugin.
The quickest transfer method is to upload the exported package file to the new site and select it as the source for the Prime Mover import. Prime Mover will search/replace the domain to match the new domain, all without having to specify either the source or destination urls!
Other backup plugins charge for Multisite support. Prime Mover is my new go-to plugin for staging-to-live transfers.
On-site payments – only for David
David used to offer on-site payments where clients could make a booking and pay later. This resulted in a few no-shows. To allow David take bookings over the phone, where he would enter the booking on the website, I enabled on-site payments on the site. Obviously we did not want this feature available to clients so I wrote code to disable on-site payments when the user was not logged in or was not an Amelia admin. The code for this is in another post: Amelia: Allow on-site payments for admins.
The was the only code that I needed to write for this website. All other changes were with GeneratePress settings and GP Premium settings and Elements.