In This Article

About Wix Site Migration to a Self-Managed Headless Project

Migration is the process of replacing your Wix site's editor-built frontend with a self-managed, externally hosted one. Your Wix site's data, business logic, and site dashboard, including any functionality you've built into it, keep running exactly as before. What changes is which frontend serves your public traffic. Your visitors see your new frontend at your site's public address, and checkout, login, and member accounts continue to run on Wix-hosted pages. The result is a self-managed headless project made up of your own frontend, backed by that Wix site's business logic and data.

This is a self-managed headless setup, so you host the frontend and manage authentication yourself. Everything stays on a single Wix site. You don't create a second site, and you don't migrate any data.

Because an editor-built site serves its pages directly on your public domain, replacing that frontend means moving your public domain from the editor site to your new frontend, and giving Wix a different domain to keep serving Wix-hosted pages. The order and timing of these changes determine whether the switch is seamless or disrupts your site. This article explains how the pieces fit together so that the steps in Migrate a Wix Site to a Self-Managed Headless Project make sense.

Note: If you want to add an extra frontend, such as a mobile app, while keeping your editor-built site as your public website, you don't need to migrate. See Add a Frontend to an Existing Wix Site instead.

How traffic is split after you migrate

After you migrate, visitor traffic is divided between 2 hosts:

Role	Example address	Served by
Public website	`www.example.com`	Your externally hosted frontend
Wix-hosted pages	`checkout.example.com`	Wix
Business data	Same Wix site	Wix

Visitors browse your public website on your frontend. When they start a process that runs on a Wix-hosted page, such as checkout or login, your frontend redirects them to the Wix-hosted subdomain. When the process finishes, Wix returns them to your frontend:

The subdomain that serves the Wix-hosted pages is a direct, non-redirecting Wix address. Because it serves those pages during checkout and login, it holds your business processes rather than your public content.

The 3 addresses you configure

Migration touches 3 separate address settings. They're easy to confuse because they can point at related domains, but each does a different job:

Primary domain: The single domain that your Wix site serves directly. After migration, this is your Wix-hosted-pages subdomain, because that's the address that needs to serve Wix pages without redirecting.
Wix pages domain: The domain visitors see while they're on a Wix-hosted checkout, login, or account page. Set this to your Wix-hosted-pages subdomain so the transition from your frontend feels seamless.
Frontend link: The address of your externally hosted frontend. Wix uses it in marketing emails and automated notifications, and as a fallback destination when returning visitors after a Wix-managed flow. Set this to your public website address.

Your launch plan needs an intended value for all 3, plus your OAuth redirect settings.

Why the domain switch happens all at once

A Wix site serves directly on a single primary domain. Any other custom domain connected to the same site permanently redirects to that primary domain rather than serving pages itself. So your public domain and your Wix-hosted-pages subdomain can't both serve the same Wix site directly at the same time.

That constraint shapes the whole migration. You can't move your public domain to external hosting gradually while the Wix-hosted-pages subdomain takes over Wix pages in parallel. Instead, the domain changes happen together at launch, when your public domain is pointed at your external host and unassigned from the Wix site, and your Wix-hosted-pages subdomain becomes the site's primary domain. Until that moment, your editor-built site keeps serving your public domain exactly as before.

Everything that doesn't touch your current domain is safe to prepare in advance. You can build and test your frontend against a preview URL, connect it to your Wix site through Headless APIs, and register preview addresses in your OAuth settings, all without affecting your published site.

What happens to redirects and SEO

Several kinds of redirects come up during migration, and they solve different problems:

Wix domain canonicalization: On your Wix site, secondary custom domains and the free Wix address permanently redirect to the primary domain. After migration, that primary domain is your Wix-hosted-pages subdomain, so these redirects point at the subdomain, not at your public website.
Frontend redirects: These are your responsibility once your public domain points to your external host. Your host handles HTTP-to-HTTPS and hostname canonicalization, and any permanent redirects from old Wix page paths to their new frontend equivalents. Search engines and bookmarks can reference old paths for months, so these redirects preserve your existing traffic and rankings.
Redirect sessions for Wix-hosted flows: Checkout and login use short-lived redirect sessions that send a visitor to a Wix-hosted page and back. These handle a single flow and aren't a substitute for permanent SEO redirects.

Self-managed headless doesn't include Wix's automatic SEO support, which is available only with the Wix-managed Astro integration. On your externally hosted frontend, you own your public website's SEO, including canonical tags, metadata, and the permanent redirects that carry your old URLs to their new locations.

What stays the same

Migration changes where your public website is served, not the Wix site behind it. The following are unaffected: