The short version: Your data comes out; your site does not. Wix builds pages with absolute positioning, which means there is no portable theme, no exportable layout, and nothing to lift and drop somewhere else. You will rebuild the pages regardless of where you go, so factor that into the decision rather than discovering it halfway through. Two things to sort out before anything else: your domain, if you registered it through Wix, because transfers have timing rules that can hold you up for weeks, and which Wix plan you are actually on, because Free and the $17 Light plan cannot take payments at all, and vendors on those are often solving a different problem than they think.
The data, and only the data.
Exports cleanly:
Does not come out at all:
That first one is the structural fact worth planning around. On most platforms a migration is products plus a redesign you *choose* to do. On Wix, the rebuild is compulsory, because the thing that made your site look how it looks does not exist anywhere except inside Wix.
That compulsory rebuild is the honest headline of this migration, and the rest of the page is about making it a small one. Our guide to switching without losing Google rankings covers the redirect half.
More than you would expect, and it changes what you are actually switching away from.
Wix's tiers are Free, Light at $17 a month, Core at $29, Business at $39, and Business Elite at $159, each per month on a yearly subscription paid in full. Commission is 0% on every plan, and Wix Payments charges 2.9% plus $0.30 on cards, or 3.7% plus $0.30 on American Express.
The part that catches people: the Free plan cannot accept payments, and neither can Light at $17. Selling starts at Core, $29 a month.
So there are two very different situations here:
Worth checking before you plan anything, because the second case is a much smaller job than people assume, and it changes the question from where do I move to to where do I start.
Sort this first, because it has a clock on it and the rest does not.
If you registered your domain through Wix, it sits with Wix as registrar. Moving it elsewhere is a transfer, and domain transfers have rules: a registrar lock you have to remove, an authorisation code you have to request, and timing restrictions that vary by registrar and by how recently the domain was registered or last transferred.
The practical sequence:
If you do not own a domain at all and your store lives on a Wix subdomain, then every link you have ever shared breaks when you leave, and there is no redirect available to you. That is worth knowing now: buy a domain, point it at your current site, and let it accumulate before you plan a move. About $15 a year, and it makes every future decision reversible.
Nine steps, and it takes longer than a Shopify or Square migration because of the rebuild.
Step seven deserves a moment. Wix sites accumulate pages: an About, a Gallery, a Contact, an FAQ, a Blog with two posts from 2024, a Testimonials page with three entries. Before rebuilding all of it, look at which pages anyone actually visits. Most food businesses find the answer is the store and possibly the About, and the rest is work nobody was reading.
That is the quiet upside of a compulsory rebuild: it forces an audit you would never otherwise do.
Longer than a Shopify move, shorter than people fear once the pages are triaged.
For a vendor with twenty products and six pages:
So the ordering side is comfortably a weekend, and none of it is difficult. The pages are whatever you choose to make them, which is why the triage in step seven is the most valuable half hour in the whole project.
The sequencing mistake to avoid is starting with the pretty part. Vendors rebuild the home page first, because it is the interesting bit, then run out of energy before the products are loaded and end up maintaining two half-finished sites. Build the store first, take a real order through it, and then decide how much site you want around it. Loading your products into a trial before you touch any design work keeps that order honest.
Depends entirely on whether you own the domain.
If you own it and take it with you: your domain authority moves with it. Individual page URLs will change, so map the ones that matter to their new equivalents and set up redirects. Expect a dip for a few weeks and a recovery.
If you were on a Wix subdomain: you lose everything attached to that address, permanently, with no redirect possible. Every old post, every printed bag, every link someone saved.
Before you move, check which pages actually receive search traffic. Most small food sites find that a handful carry almost everything, which turns redirect mapping from a comprehensive project into a short list.
Our comparison of Squarespace against Wix for food vendors covers what each is genuinely good at, and it is worth reading before assuming the grass is greener rather than just differently shaped.
Three reasons, and only one of them is price.
It is a website builder, not an ordering system. Wix does pages beautifully and treats commerce as something bolted alongside. A vendor whose actual requirement is pickup days, cutoffs per market, and per-day quantity caps is asking a design tool to run operations.
The design freedom becomes a cost. Absolute positioning means you can build anything, and it also means you cannot swap a template later, your mobile layout is a separate thing to maintain, and nothing you built is portable. That is a fair trade if design is your differentiator and a bad one if it is not.
$348 a year for pages nobody reads. Core at $29 a month is reasonable for a website. For a vendor whose customers arrive from Instagram already knowing what they want, it is $200 more than an ordering platform and the extra buys a home page people pass through.
Our look at Wix alternatives for food vendors covers where it strains for local selling.
Four things, chosen because they are why you are leaving.
If a candidate cannot do the first two, you are moving sideways. Our guide to selling food on your own website without Shopify covers the case where you genuinely do want to keep a site, and our piece on websites versus marketplaces versus order forms covers which of the three your business actually needs.
For that shape, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds, and they matter especially here: it is not a website builder. There are no templates, no galleries, no blog, no pages to design, and it does not ship nationally. If your Wix site is doing real marketing work, converting visitors who did not already know you, then replacing it with an ordering tool is a downgrade and you should keep a site. If your Wix site is a home page people click past on the way to ordering, you can rebuild just the ordering part in a trial in an evening and see what you actually miss.
A folder you own, because the compulsory rebuild taught you something.
That folder is what makes your *next* decision cheap. The reason this migration is more work than most is that Wix holds the presentation layer and will not give it back. Keeping your own copy of the content means that only ever costs you once.
The National Archives' records management guidance is written for institutions, and its core principle applies here exactly: decide what counts as a record, keep it somewhere you control, and do not rely on a vendor to preserve it. CISA's Secure Our World guidance is worth five minutes on the account-hygiene side while you are changing registrars and passwords anyway.
Every platform below shows the same four commercial facts, because a table that lists one platform's transaction fee and not another's is not a comparison. "Not published" means exactly that: the company does not state it publicly.
| Platform | What a food storefront adds | Subscription (annual) | Free trial | Platform fee | Card processing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | A website, but no pickup-day or per-item cap logic | Light $17/mo, Core $29/mo | No free trial | $0 platform fee | 2.9% + $0.30 processing (Amex 3.7%) |
| Homegrown | Pickup per location with day and cutoff, per-item caps | $10/mo billed annually | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Bake.Shop | Drop scheduling for bakers | $149/yr (= $12.42/mo) | 14-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Square Online | Pickup scheduling on the free tier | Free tier; paid from $29/mo per location | 30-day trial on paid plans | $0 platform fee | 3.3% + $0.30 free tier, 2.9% + $0.30 paid |
| Cococart | A link, not a site | $19/mo store, $59 Pro | 7-day free trial | Platform fee not published | Processing not published |
| Shopify | Full store, shipping-first | $29/mo Basic | 3-day trial, then $1/mo for 3 | 2% platform fee if not on Shopify Payments | from 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
No. Wix builds pages with absolute positioning, so there is no portable theme or template and nothing another platform can import. Your contacts, orders, and products export as data, but the site itself has to be rebuilt.
Contacts with names and emails, orders with line items, and your product list. Images have to be downloaded individually, and page text has to be copied manually into a document.
No. Neither the Free plan nor the $17 Light plan can accept payments. Selling starts at Core, $29 a month. If you are on Free or Light, you have a website rather than a store and the migration is much smaller than you think.
If Wix is your registrar, remove the transfer lock, request the authorisation code, and start the transfer before you need it, since transfers take days and recently registered domains often carry restrictions. Do not cancel the plan until it has completed.
You lose that address permanently with no redirect possible, so every shared link breaks. Buy your own domain and point it at your current site well before you plan any move.
Not if you own the domain and set up redirects for the pages that actually receive traffic. Check your analytics first; most small food sites find a handful of pages carry nearly all of it.
Because it is a website builder rather than an ordering system. Pickup days, per-market cutoffs, and quantity caps are operations problems, and a design tool asked to run operations does it awkwardly at $348 a year.
Plan for a rebuild, because there is no version of this where the site moves. Wix's absolute positioning means the design exists only inside Wix, so whichever platform you choose, the pages get built again from scratch.
Two things to handle before anything else: your domain, which needs unlocking, an authorisation code, and enough lead time for a transfer that takes days, and your plan, since Free and Light cannot take payments and vendors on those often have far less to migrate than they assume.
And use the forced rebuild rather than resenting it. Before recreating an About page, a Gallery, an FAQ, and a Testimonials page, check which of them anyone visited. Most food businesses find the store and one other page carry everything, and the rest was work nobody was reading.
