How I Rebuilt My WordPress Website on Wix Infrastructure

Introduction

Two months ago, I joined Wix as the company’s Global Developer Advocate, and the first project I got to work on was Wix Headless. I’ll explain what Headless is in a bit, but the bottom line is that it got me super excited about migrating my personal website - a WordPress site hosted on Dreamhost.com - over to Wix infrastructure.

Why? Mainly because the e-commerce section of my site (I’m a published author and sell my books directly on the site) was, in all honesty, pretty clunky. I’m always busy and never took the time to set up a full-featured WP e-commerce plugin like WooCommerce, so I ended up handling customer messages and inventory by hand… The thought of using an AI agent to build and configure a proper storefront on Wix using Wix Headless was really appealing. Plus, as a Wix employee I get free hosting, which doesn't hurt... but really, it was the chance to upgrade my storefront that hooked me.

RePlatform

As luck would have it, I recently learned about a new AI skill we’re releasing called RePlatform, built to help AI agents handle this exact job: migrating an existing site - including WordPress sites - over to Wix infrastructure. Still, the skill is brand new and still in active development, so I was a bit nervous to try it on my live site. After all, real people visit it and buy books from it every day. If the migration bombed, I’d have a lot of cleanup to do…

Then I realized: hey, I’m Wix’s Developer Advocate. My job is to educate developers to try our tools, love them, and build with them. If I’m too chicken to use our new tech on my own site, how can I look at myself in the mirror? I mean, I’m good-looking - but that’s beside the point. So I took a deep breath and volunteered as one of the first guinea pigs for the RePlatform skill.

I started by reading through the RePlatform skill to understand how the agent works. There are two main migration paths: a backend-only approach where the existing frontend stays put and only the business logic (payments, CMS, etc.) moves to Wix, and a full rebuild. The backend option is limited and thus easier to pull off, but my goal was to recreate my frontend as an exact replica, swapping WordPress for the Astro web framework while overhauling the backend using Wix Stores, Wix CMS, and Wix Blog.

Right away, two big challenges stood out. First, my site content is pretty varied: articles, books, digital downloads, short-form videos, and - most importantly - a podcast section complete with embedded players and an RSS feed generator. I wasn't sure if the agent could pull all that off. Second, my website is in Hebrew, a right-to-left language - though I assumed the agent could handle RTL without much trouble.

A Careful Process

With shaky fingers, I opened a new session and sent the following prompt:

I want you to take this Wordpress website - www.ranlevi.co.il - and rebuild it on Wix, using the following skill: https://github.com/wix/skills/blob/main/skills/wix-replatform/SKILL.md.

Include all the website’s public facing content, including the books shop section.

Don’t do anything active yet - let’s plan this migration.

My agent went to work: it crawled the live site, cataloged the content and products, and drafted a clear migration plan. It was a conservative plan, focused on keeping the live site running uninterrupted while we built the replacement behind the scenes:

Copy all site content and import it into Wix CMS and Wix Blog.
Set up a store with the full product catalog and a verified payment checkout flow.
Build a full replica of the frontend, including the embedded audio player and RSS feed generator.
Once everything is tested and working, point ranlevi.co.il to the new site.

The agent started on step one, and right away I noticed how cautious it was. The RePlatform skill instructs the agent to ensure that nothing breaks on the live site, so every step is tightly controlled with backups and approval checkpoints.

That was a smart design decision by the engineering team behind the skill - Dan Bar-Shalom, Elad Kaisy and Itay Herskovits. First, it built my confidence in the process - which matters a lot when it’s your own business on the line. Second, all those approval gates gave me time to spot potential hitches as they came up and fix them early, making sure the final site matched what I wanted. Sure, it slowed things down - the whole migration took about a day and a half, whereas a "one-shot" automated migration might have wrapped up in a couple of hours. But going the steady route saved me from discovering a dozen subtle bugs later that would have taken days to untangle anyway. As the old saying goes, "shortcuts make long delays."

The one downside to this cautious approach was that the agent paused for everything. It asked for confirmation on tiny adjustments, like changing a CSS class. I must have typed "approved" at least 50 times! It was a bit tedious, but since RePlatform is brand new, I know the engineering team is dialing in the right balance between agent autonomy and user oversight. Expect a smoother experience soon.

Limitless Possibilities

Another nice surprise of the step-by-step pace was that it gave me time to dream bigger about what moving from WordPress to a custom Astro frontend could actually unlock.

Don't get me wrong: I love WordPress. I’ve built at least a dozen sites on WP over the last 15 years. It’s a great platform, and there’s a good reason half the web runs on it. That said, WordPress has a fundamental constraint: it’s structured around a template model. It assumes your content fits into standard pages and posts, and you have to work within those boundaries. Of course, WP's massive plugin ecosystem lets you extend those capabilities, but every plugin is its own mini-system with its own setup rules and quirks. Learning to configure complex plugins like WooCommerce takes real effort, and getting everything to look and feel cohesive can be a hassle.

The ideal fix was always a custom website built from scratch, but that used to feel impractical. Even as a developer, building a custom e-commerce site with databases, payment gateways, and GDPR compliance is a big undertaking - and maintaining it afterward is even worse. So despite its template constraints, WordPress was usually the practical choice.

AI coding agents completely change that equation. With an agent handling the heavy lifting, I don't have to fit into a pre-made template anymore. The agent can build and maintain a custom frontend, while connecting seamlessly to Wix’s backend to manage payments, security, and infrastructure reliably.

Once that clicked, my imagination took off. Why stick with basic embedded audio players when I could design a podcast experience that feels like a standalone app? Why not give short-form video pages an interface like Instagram or TikTok? Things that would be tough in WordPress are straightforward now. I’ve even been reading about the WebMCP standard for agentic web interactions - how cool would it be to integrate that next?

I desperately wanted to build all of it right then and there, but I had a deadline to hit, so I focused on the main goal: an exact replica of the live site on Wix. I can always add fancy features later.

Wix Headless

Within minutes, step one was complete: the agent pulled the content from my live site and imported it into Wix CMS and Wix Blog using Wix Headless. This is a good spot to explain what Headless actually means in this context.

Historically, using Wix’s business infrastructure - stores, payments, bookings, databases - meant building your site inside the visual Wix Editor. The Editor is great for making complex sites quickly without code, but drag-and-drop tools naturally constrain design flexibility for developers who want total control over their stack.

Wix Headless changes that: developers can build whatever frontend they want - using any framework, hosted anywhere - and wire it directly into Wix’s business backend. Originally this required using Wix CLI tools manually, but an AI agent equipped with the Wix Headless Skill can handle those steps in a fraction of the time.

That’s exactly what my agent did. It used the CLI tools to sync the content over to Wix, with almost no effort on my end beyond granting API permissions when prompted.

Next up was the storefront. My old setup was super basic: clicking "Buy" sent buyers to a plain PayPal payment link, and everything after that was manual. I emailed digital files myself and kept track of book inventory by hand. Moving the catalog into Wix Stores took about an hour of agent work, but at the end of it, I had a real e-commerce setup complete with inventory tracking and an automated PayPal checkout flow.

Dancing with Agents

Step three was recreating the frontend layout. The agent generated the code quickly, but the initial draft was pretty rough - colors were off, fonts didn't match, and some content sections were missing. The fix was easy: I had the main agent spin up a review sub-agent to compare the new site against the original and flag visual discrepancies. The main agent made the fixes, the sub-agent checked again, and they ran that loop until the design matched up nicely.

While the agents worked through their routine, I spent half an hour relaxing on the couch with my feet elevated (herniated discs are no joke - take care of your back!). By the time I walked back to my desk, the replica was nearly identical to the original site.

Next, I had the agent deploy the site to a staging URL on Wix servers. We hooked up the "Contact Us" form to Wix Forms, made a few minor visual tweaks, and the new frontend was ready to go.

The Dreaded RSS Feed

The trickiest part was the podcast setup. Podcasts can be finicky: web players often feel clunky, and building a clean, compliant RSS feed for Spotify and Apple Podcasts takes care. After chatting options over with the agent, we landed on an open-source audio player called Podigee, which worked great once configured.

As I expected, replacing the WP plugin that generated my RSS feed with a custom solution wasn’t trivial: I again needed to find an open source solution that could be integrated into the new frontend, and configure it so that the actual .mp3 files would still be stored on Dreamhost, my original host, but the new generator would be able to pick them up from serve the feed to the clients correctly. It took an hour of careful work with the agent guiding me through the process. Still - I think this level of tinkering is not for the faint of heart, and my experience with developing websites for podcasts probably helped me considerably.

Taking the Plunge

Once the new site was fully tested and matched the original, we made the switch by updating the domain’s nameservers to point to Wix. DNS changes always make me a little nervous, so I had the agent handle the updates using its browser tool.

And just like that, we were live! The whole process took about two days. While AI migration tools still benefit from a developer's eye to guide decisions, I ended up with a vastly upgraded site, a proper e-commerce engine, and complete freedom for future updates - all without the usual head-shaking headaches. What a time to build web apps!

Cheers,

Ran