How to migrate from Weebly to WordPress

Short answer: Weebly is harder to migrate from than Squarespace because it has no native WordPress export. The two viable paths are the Weebly to WP Importer plugin (which scrapes your live Weebly site over HTTP) or manual content extraction (copy-paste plus image downloads). Either way, you rebuild design, navigation, forms, and any Square Online commerce manually in WordPress. Plan for a weekend if your site is under 30 pages and blog posts; plan for two weeks if you have a Square Online store or member content.

This guide covers both migration paths end to end, the limitations of each, the image and URL problems specific to Weebly’s CDN, the 301 redirect setup that preserves your SEO, and the domain transfer mechanics. If you have already moved a Squarespace site to WordPress, much of this is familiar – but the export step is genuinely different, and the lack of a clean WXR file is the reason Weebly migrations have a reputation for being annoying.

Migration at a glance#

Phase	What it covers	Time for a 30-page site	Time for a 100+ page site
Plan	Inventory content, pick hosting, set up staging WordPress	1-2 hours	3-5 hours
Extract content	Run importer plugin OR manual copy-paste	30 minutes – 4 hours	1-2 days
Fix images and URLs	Pull images off Weebly CDN, fix internal links	1-3 hours	1-2 days
Rebuild pages and design	Theme, navigation, forms, any commerce	4-12 hours	1-2 weeks
Redirects and DNS	301 map, domain transfer or DNS change	1-3 hours	2-4 hours
Post-launch	Test, fix broken links, submit to Search Console	2-3 hours	1-2 days

The migration is back-loaded into the rebuild phase even more than Squarespace, because Weebly’s export gives you static HTML rather than structured content. Almost everything visual rebuilds.

What you can and cannot get out of Weebly#

Weebly’s “export site” feature is the first surprise. It generates a ZIP file of static HTML, CSS, and image files – your site as a browseable folder. There is no WordPress export format, no structured database export, and no easy way to map Weebly’s content into WordPress’s post and page model without scraping the HTML.

What the Weebly export ZIP includes#

• Static HTML files for each page (including blog posts as individual HTML)
• CSS and JavaScript files
• Images referenced in the HTML
• Site navigation structure (embedded in each HTML file’s header)

What it does not include in a useful form#

• Posts and pages as structured content (you get HTML soup, not titles + bodies)
• Categories and tags as taxonomies (only as embedded HTML)
• Form configurations and submissions
• Square Online store products, orders, customers, inventory
• Member areas, gated content, password-protected pages
• Comments
• 301 redirects you may have configured in Weebly
• Custom code blocks (often present, often inlined in HTML)

For a content-only site (blog posts and a few static pages), the static HTML is enough to extract content from with the right tools. For anything more complex, expect manual rebuild.

Path A: Weebly to WP Importer plugin (recommended for most)#

The free Weebly to WP Importer plugin is the most common automated migration path. It does not use Weebly’s export ZIP – instead, it scrapes your live Weebly site over HTTP, parses the HTML, and creates corresponding WordPress posts and pages.

How it works#

1. Install the plugin on your WordPress site (Plugins > Add New > search “Weebly Importer”).
2. Enter your live Weebly URL (e.g., yoursite.weebly.com or your custom domain).
3. The plugin crawls your Weebly site, identifies posts and pages, and imports them as WordPress drafts.
4. You review the drafts, fix anything weird (the importer is not perfect), and publish.

What it handles well#

• Blog post titles, bodies, publish dates
• Static page content
• Internal navigation links (sometimes)
• Image URLs (still pointing at Weebly’s CDN – covered in the next section)
• Author attribution (mapped to your WordPress admin user)

What it does not handle#

• Forms (these become broken iframes or missing blocks)
• Galleries beyond simple image grids
• Square Online store content
• Custom HTML embeds and third-party widgets
• Some Weebly-specific layouts (multi-column section blocks, animated headers)
• Password-protected pages

When the plugin breaks#

The plugin scrapes HTML, so anything that depends on Weebly’s JavaScript or server-side rendering at request time can fail to extract cleanly. Common failure modes:

• Slow or unresponsive Weebly site. The scraper times out before it finishes. Run the import in chunks (the plugin lets you import sections of your site separately).
• Heavily customized HTML. Themes with deep customizations sometimes produce HTML the parser does not recognize, and you end up with raw HTML in your WordPress post bodies. You will edit these manually after import.
• Free Weebly subdomain rate limits. Weebly throttles aggressive scraping on free-tier subdomains. Spread the import across multiple sessions if you hit rate limits.

For a 30-page site, the plugin gets you 80-90% of the way there in an hour or two of work. For a 100+ page site, expect the same percentage but several hours of cleanup.

Path B: Manual extraction (small sites or when Path A fails)#

If your site is small (under 20 pages) or the importer plugin produces unusable results, manual copy-paste is sometimes the fastest path.

The process#

1. List every page on your Weebly site. Walk your navigation, note every URL.
2. For each page: open it in two browser tabs – one to read, one with your WordPress editor open.
3. Copy the content (right-click > select all > copy). Paste into the WordPress editor.
4. Clean up the formatting. WordPress’s paste handling is reasonable but you will get some Weebly-specific CSS classes that should be stripped.
5. Download images one at a time, re-upload to WordPress’s media library, re-insert into the post.
6. Verify internal links point at the eventual WordPress URLs, not the old Weebly URLs.

This is tedious for anything over 10-15 pages. The advantage is reliability – you see every page individually and catch problems the importer would miss.

A faster manual approach for blog-heavy sites#

If most of your Weebly content is blog posts, an HTML-to-Markdown conversion approach can save hours:

1. Use Weebly’s export ZIP. Find the folder containing your blog post HTML files.
2. Run each through a tool like Pandoc or an online HTML-to-Markdown converter.
3. Copy the resulting Markdown into WordPress’s editor (Gutenberg’s “Markdown” content recognition picks it up automatically).
4. Handle images separately – extract the image URLs, download from Weebly’s CDN, re-upload.

This still requires per-post work but is faster than copy-paste because the formatting carries through more cleanly.

Step 1: Set up WordPress before you migrate anything#

The same rule from any migration: do not migrate into your production WordPress site directly. Stand up a staging environment first.

Permalinks first. Settings > Permalinks > Post name. This produces yoursite.com/post-title/ URLs – the closest match to Weebly’s /post-title.html and /blog/post-title patterns. You will need this for the redirect map to be short.

Install an SEO plugin. Yoast or Rank Math. You will need per-post meta descriptions and sitemap generation immediately.

Pick a theme that is not trying to look like Weebly. Twenty Twenty-Five, Kadence, Astra, GeneratePress – modern WordPress themes are faster and more flexible than anything Weebly produced. Trying to recreate your Weebly design pixel-for-pixel is the largest time waste in this migration. See how to change, install, and customize a WordPress theme.

Set the homepage strategy. Weebly defaults to a static homepage. If you want the same in WordPress, see how to set the homepage in WordPress. If you want the WordPress blog page as homepage, configure that under Settings > Reading.

Step 2: Run the migration (Path A or B)#

Pick the path from the section above. For most users on most sites, the importer plugin gets you the most content for the least work, with manual cleanup as the trailing step.

Run it during a quiet window. The plugin hits your Weebly site repeatedly. If Weebly is your active production site, do this off-peak.

Save the Weebly export ZIP regardless. Even if you use Path A, the export ZIP is your backup. Squarespace lets you re-export anytime; Weebly is less reliable on this point given the platform’s drift under Square.

Review every imported post and page. The importer is not perfect. Common issues:

• Images broken or showing the alt text instead
• Internal links pointing at the old Weebly URL
• Tables flattened into unstructured text
• Multi-column layouts collapsed into single-column

Fix these post by post. A 30-page site is a half-day of cleanup work. A 100-page site is 2-3 days.

Step 3: Fix the image problem#

Weebly hosts images on its own CDN ( cdn2.editmysite.com or similar). After the importer runs, your WordPress posts still reference those CDN URLs. The day you cancel Weebly, every image breaks.

The fix is the same as the Squarespace migration: install the free Auto Upload Images plugin, let it scan your imported posts, and it will download each image into WordPress’s media library and rewrite the URLs to local references.

For Weebly specifically, watch for:

• Resized variants in URLs. Weebly serves multiple sizes of each image ( image.jpg , image_500.jpg , etc.). Auto Upload Images handles this, but verify the resulting WordPress media library does not have duplicates.
• Background images. Weebly often uses CSS background images for headers and section dividers. These do not get extracted by Auto Upload Images because they are not <img> tags. You will need to manually download and re-add them in your WordPress theme settings.
• PDF and document files. Same issue as images – they stay on Weebly’s CDN unless you grab them. Search your imported content for weebly.com/uploads/ links and replace manually.

After Auto Upload Images runs, install Broken Link Checker and let it scan. Anything still pointing at <em>.weebly.com or </em>.editmysite.com is unmigrated.

Step 4: Rebuild the non-content parts of your site#

Posts and pages come over (mostly). Everything else rebuilds.

Navigation menus. Weebly’s navigation does not import. Recreate manually in Appearance > Menus (classic themes) or the block editor’s Site Editor (block themes).

Forms. Weebly’s contact and signup forms do not migrate. Use WPForms, Fluent Forms, Gravity Forms, or Contact Form 7 in WordPress. Wire them to the same email destination or your email service provider.

Square Online store. This is the hardest part of any Weebly migration. Square Online (formerly Weebly Promote and various other names depending on when you signed up) does not migrate to WooCommerce automatically. Options:

• Manual recreation for small catalogs (under 50 products). Fastest path for small stores.
• CSV export from Square Online (Products > Export) + custom Python script or WooCommerce’s CSV importer to transform the data.
• Paid migration services like Cart2Cart or LitExtension. The price scales with product count.

Customer data and order history are particularly hard. Square Online holds customer accounts and payment tokens that cannot leave Square – you start fresh on customer accounts when you move to WooCommerce.

Member areas. Weebly’s gated content does not export. Use MemberPress, Restrict Content Pro, or the free Restrict User Access plugin to rebuild access controls. Existing members get a fresh-start email with new credentials.

Custom HTML embed blocks. Weebly has a “Embed Code” block that lets you paste raw HTML. The importer captures these as raw HTML in WordPress, which often works but sometimes does not – inspect each one.

Apps and integrations. Anything you installed from the Weebly App Center (analytics, marketing tools, popups, calendars) has no automatic equivalent. Replace with WordPress plugins that serve the same function.

Step 5: Handle the URL structure problem#

Weebly URLs follow a few different patterns depending on when you set up the site:

• Blog posts: yoursite.com/blog/post-title.html (older) or yoursite.com/post-title (newer)
• Pages: yoursite.com/page-title.html or yoursite.com/page-title
• Categories: yoursite.com/blog/category/category-name (sometimes)

WordPress with “Post name” permalinks produces yoursite.com/post-title/ . You have three choices:

1. Use a custom permalink structure /blog/%postname%.html to match older Weebly URLs exactly. Pro: every URL stays identical, near-zero redirect map. Con: locks you into a .html suffix forever, looks dated.
2. Use flat WordPress /%postname%/ permalinks and 301 redirect every old URL. Pro: cleaner long-term, fits modern conventions. Con: every URL needs a redirect entry, larger redirect map.
3. Use /blog/%postname%/ for posts (matches newer Weebly) and /%pagename%/ for pages. Reasonable middle ground.

Option 2 is what most migrations end up doing. The redirect map is one-time work; the cleaner URLs pay off forever. The exception is sites with hundreds of inbound backlinks to specific .html URLs from external sites – in that case Option 1 saves you the redirect complexity, but you live with .html extensions for the long term.

Step 6: Set up 301 redirects#

This is where Weebly migrations especially benefit from careful planning. Weebly’s URL structure differences (and the .html suffix issue) mean the redirect map is often more complex than Squarespace’s.

Building the redirect map#

Open a spreadsheet. Two columns:

Old URL (Weebly)	New URL (WordPress)
/welcome.html	/welcome/
/blog/first-post.html	/first-post/
/blog/category/news	/category/news/

To generate this:

1. Export Weebly’s sitemap. Visit yoursite.weebly.com/sitemap.xml (or your custom domain). Save the file.
2. Export WordPress’s sitemap (Yoast or Rank Math generates one automatically). Compare the two.
3. Build the mapping in your spreadsheet. For 30 pages this is a quick manual task. For 100+ a script is faster.

Implementing the redirects#

Three places to put them:

1. WordPress redirect plugin (Redirection by John Godley). Import the spreadsheet, done. Easiest for most users.
2. Server-level nginx or Apache rules. Faster than plugins, no database overhead.
3. A managed redirect manager if your host provides one.

For redirect mechanics in detail, how to change your WordPress domain name covers the same patterns from a domain-change angle.

A note about free Weebly subdomains#

If your site lives at yoursite.weebly.com (a free Weebly subdomain) rather than a custom domain, you cannot set up redirects from it. Weebly owns that subdomain. The day you stop paying Weebly, the subdomain redirects to a Weebly upsell page or simply 404s.

You have two options:

• Buy your custom domain now, point it at Weebly first (Weebly lets you map custom domains), wait a few weeks for Google to recognize the custom domain as canonical, then migrate.
• Accept the SEO loss. Move to WordPress on a fresh domain and start over for SEO purposes.

Neither is ideal. If you have meaningful traffic on a yoursite.weebly.com URL, the first option is worth the effort. If you have minimal traffic, the second is faster.

Step 7: Move the domain#

If you are on a custom domain (recommended path), you have two routes.

Path A: Transfer the domain to a new registrar#

Weebly resells domain registration through third parties. To transfer out:

1. Sign in to your Weebly account, go to Domains.
2. Unlock the domain (sometimes called “remove transfer lock” or “enable transfer”).
3. Request the authorization code (EPP code, transfer code). Weebly will email it – sometimes with a 7-day delay.
4. At your new registrar (Namecheap, Cloudflare Registrar, Porkbun, etc.), start the transfer and paste the auth code.
5. Wait 5-7 days for the transfer to complete.
6. Update DNS at the new registrar to point at your WordPress host.
7. Cancel Weebly only after the transfer completes.

Path B: Keep the domain at Weebly, change DNS only#

Weebly lets you point DNS records elsewhere while keeping the domain registered with them.

1. In Weebly’s domain settings, edit DNS records.
2. Update A records for @ and www to your WordPress host’s IP, or use a CNAME if your host requires it.
3. Wait 1-24 hours for DNS to propagate.

Path A gives you control and usually cheaper renewals. Path B is faster but means continuing Weebly payments for the domain.

Step 8: Post-launch checks#

Same checklist as any migration, with one Weebly-specific addition:

• Open the new site in incognito at the old Weebly URL. Should redirect to the WordPress version.
• Test 5 random old URLs including a .html URL. Each should 301 to the new WordPress URL.
• Broken Link Checker scan. Look for anything still hitting <em>.weebly.com or </em>.editmysite.com .
• Submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console.
• Check for 404s in Search Console for the first 2-3 weeks. Some will surface as Google re-crawls.
• Test forms and any rebuilt commerce checkout flow.
• Verify Google Analytics is firing on the new site.
• Check the homepage redirect. Weebly users on the www version sometimes hit redirect loops if www and apex are not both pointing at WordPress.
• Export Weebly Analytics history before canceling – same story as Squarespace, it disappears the moment you cancel.

Common mistakes#

• Canceling Weebly before DNS propagates. Domain has no destination, site goes dark. Keep Weebly running at least 7 days after DNS cutover.
• Skipping the image migration. Posts look fine for weeks because images load from Weebly’s CDN – until you cancel and they all break. Always run Auto Upload Images.
• Forgetting .html suffix in the redirect map. If your Weebly URLs end in .html , the redirect entry must include the suffix. Easy to miss when building the map from a sitemap that omits trailing characters.
• Trying to recreate Weebly’s design. Weebly themes are not modern, not fast, and not flexible. Pick a clean WordPress theme. Forcing Weebly aesthetics into WordPress costs days and produces neither.
• Migrating into production without staging. If something breaks, you cannot easily roll back. Stage first.
• Underestimating Square Online migration time. This is the single most common Weebly-migration timeline blowout. If you have a store, plan for 2-3x the time you initially budget.
• Not backing up the Weebly export ZIP. Even if you do not use it, save it. Weebly’s tooling has been less reliable since the Square acquisition, and re-exporting later may not work.
• Ignoring the free-subdomain problem. If your site is on yoursite.weebly.com , no redirects are possible. Recognize this before migrating; plan for SEO impact.

How long does it take?#

Site type	Realistic timeline
Blog + a few static pages, under 30 items	1-2 days
Content site, 30-100 pages	4-7 days
Content site with member area	1-2 weeks
Site with Square Online store, under 50 products	1-2 weeks
Site with Square Online store, 50+ products	2-4 weeks
Heavily customized site with apps and embeds	2-4 weeks

The single biggest variable is whether you have a Square Online store. Without one, Weebly migrations are slightly more annoying than Squarespace migrations (no clean export) but faster overall (less complex content). With a store, plan for the longest end of the range and consider a paid migration service.

How Hostney handles this#

Hostney is purpose-built for WordPress, so once you are off Weebly and onto WordPress, the host decision matters more than the migration mechanic. For the migration itself: one-click WordPress install for spinning up a staging environment in a few minutes, file manager and MySQL access for any database-level cleanup the importer plugin leaves behind, SFTP and SSH so you can run Auto Upload Images on hundreds of posts without timing out, the built-in 301 redirect manager for the spreadsheet of old-Weebly-URL to new-WordPress-URL mappings, and per-site PHP version selection so you can match whatever your imported WordPress site needs.

For the post-migration site: daily automated backups capture your work before any cleanup edits – so an accidental find-and-replace mistake is reversible. The Hostney Cache plugin handles object and full-page caching with automatic purge on content changes, which matters more on WordPress than on Weebly because Weebly’s caching is invisible to you and WordPress’s is something you can actually tune.

Hostney does not include a Weebly-to-WordPress migration tool – our migration plugin is built specifically for WordPress-to-WordPress moves where the hard parts are archive timeouts, serialized data corruption, and find-and-replace at scale (why most WordPress migrations fail covers these in depth). For Weebly migrations the right path is the Weebly to WP Importer plugin plus Auto Upload Images, which is what this guide covers. Where Hostney earns its place is the WordPress hosting that runs the migrated site – the next decade of your site, not the one-time migration step.

For people who landed on this guide because they are weighing platforms before migrating, how to migrate from Squarespace to WordPress covers the sister migration with a cleaner export path. For the general migration concepts that apply to any source platform, what is website migration and how does it work is the broader read.

Summary#

Weebly to WordPress is a two-path migration: the Weebly to WP Importer plugin is the automated path that handles 80-90% of content for most sites; manual extraction is the fallback when the plugin fails or for very small sites. Either way, design, navigation, forms, member areas, and Square Online commerce rebuild manually in WordPress. The unique Weebly traps are the lack of a WordPress-compatible export (you scrape your own live site or extract from static HTML), the .html suffix on older URLs that complicates the redirect map, and the free-subdomain trap if you never moved to a custom domain. Set up redirects from every old Weebly URL before DNS cutover, run Auto Upload Images so post content references the WordPress media library, keep Weebly running for at least a week after the new site is live, and recognize that Square Online stores are the single biggest timeline variable. Done right, you land on a platform that will not be re-platformed under you and that you control directly for the long term.