How to Migrate from Kajabi to WordPress

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform built for selling courses, memberships, and digital products. It handles hosting, email, checkout, and course delivery in one subscription. That convenience is also its ceiling: you pay a premium monthly fee (roughly $150 to $400+ per month depending on plan), you're limited to Kajabi's page builder and themes, and you can't install custom code or third-party plugins the way you can on an open platform. As a business grows, those constraints start to cost more than the subscription.

Migrating from Kajabi to WordPress gives you full ownership of your content, thousands of plugins, unlimited design flexibility, and hosting you control. But it's a genuine platform-to-platform migration, not a one-click transfer. Kajabi has no native WordPress export, so content moves manually or through custom tooling, and if you don't handle URLs and redirects carefully you can lose the search rankings you spent years building. This guide walks through exactly what changes, what breaks, and how to do it without tanking your SEO.

We've run dozens of CMS-to-CMS moves, so the steps below reflect what actually happens in practice, not a checklist that ignores the messy parts.

Why businesses move from Kajabi to WordPress

The reasons are consistent across the businesses that make this switch:

• Cost at scale. Kajabi's tiered pricing climbs as you add products, contacts, and admin users. WordPress software is free; you pay only for hosting (often $10 to $50/month) and any premium plugins you choose.
• Design and flexibility limits. Kajabi's themes and page editor are fine for a landing page, but they cap what you can build. WordPress with a builder like Elementor, or a custom theme, lets you design anything.
• SEO control. WordPress with Yoast or Rank Math gives granular control over titles, schema, sitemaps, redirects, and URL structure that Kajabi simply doesn't expose.
• Ownership and portability. On WordPress you own the database and files. You're never locked into one vendor's roadmap or pricing.
• Ecosystem. Need a specific CRM, LMS, membership gate, or checkout? WordPress has a plugin or integration for it, plus the option of fully custom website and CRM development when off-the-shelf tools fall short.

What changes and what breaks in the move

Understanding what doesn't transfer cleanly is the difference between a smooth migration and weeks of cleanup. Here's the honest breakdown:

• Content: Blog posts, page copy, and images have to be exported or copied manually. Kajabi lets you export contacts and some data as CSV, but there's no WordPress-ready content file, so most sites rebuild pages and re-import posts by hand or via a script.
• URLs: This is the big one. Kajabi URL patterns (for example /blog/post-name or /offers/...) rarely match WordPress defaults. Every changed URL needs a redirect or you lose that page's rankings and inbound links.
• Design: Kajabi themes don't carry over. You'll rebuild the design in a WordPress theme or page builder. Plan to recreate, not copy.
• Courses and memberships: Kajabi's course player, drip scheduling, and membership gating don't exist in WordPress out of the box. You'll replace them with an LMS plugin (LearnDash, LifterLMS, Tutor LMS) or a membership plugin (MemberPress), and rebuild course structure and student access.
• Checkout and payments: Kajabi's built-in checkout is replaced by WooCommerce, SureCart, or a direct Stripe/PayPal integration. Existing subscriptions may need to be re-created or migrated with your payment processor's help.
• Email and automations: Kajabi Email sequences don't move to WordPress. You'll connect an email tool (Mailchimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign) and rebuild automations there.

Step 1: Audit and export everything from Kajabi

Before touching WordPress, inventory the existing site. Crawl it with a tool like Screaming Frog to capture every live URL, its title, and its meta description. Export your Kajabi contacts and any product/transaction data as CSV. Save copies of all page and post content, and download your media library (images, PDFs, videos). For courses, document the full structure: modules, lessons, drip rules, and which offers grant access to what.

The single most valuable artifact from this step is a complete list of your current URLs, because it becomes your redirect map later. Note which pages get real search traffic (pull this from Google Search Console and Google Analytics) so you know which pages absolutely must retain their rankings. Following a structured website migration SEO checklist here prevents the most common cause of post-launch traffic loss: pages that quietly disappear.

Step 2: Set up WordPress and rebuild the site

Stand up WordPress on quality hosting (managed hosts like Kinsta, WP Engine, or SiteGround make this easier). Do the build on a staging domain or subdomain, never on the live site, so you can work without downtime. Then:

• Choose a theme or page builder and rebuild your key page designs.
• Install core plugins: an SEO plugin (Yoast or Rank Math), a redirect manager, a caching/performance plugin, and a security plugin.
• Add the functional plugins that replace Kajabi features: an LMS or membership plugin for courses, and WooCommerce or SureCart for checkout.
• Match your URL structure to Kajabi wherever possible. In Settings, Permalinks, choose a structure that mirrors your old paths. The closer the new URLs are to the old ones, the fewer redirects you need. If Kajabi used /blog/post-name, configure WordPress to do the same.

If you'd rather not manage plugin selection, hosting, and rebuild yourself, this is where specialized WordPress website development pays for itself, both in speed and in avoiding avoidable SEO mistakes.

Step 3: Import and recreate content

Migrate blog posts and pages into WordPress. For a handful of pages, copy-paste is fine; for dozens of posts, a developer can script the import from your exported content into the WordPress database or via the REST API. Re-upload images to the WordPress media library and fix internal links so they point to new paths, not the old Kajabi domain.

Rebuild courses inside your LMS: recreate modules and lessons, re-upload or re-link videos (many Kajabi sites host video on Kajabi's own player, so plan for Vimeo, Bunny, or another host), and set up drip schedules and access rules. Recreate checkout products and pricing. Test that a student can enroll and access content end to end before you go anywhere near launch.

Step 4: Build and implement your 301 redirect map

This step protects your SEO more than any other. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that tells Google a page has moved, passing the old page's ranking authority to the new URL. Every old Kajabi URL that changes needs one pointing to its new WordPress equivalent.

• Build a spreadsheet with two columns: old URL and new URL. Map every page from your Step 1 crawl.
• Prioritize pages with traffic, backlinks, and conversions, but redirect everything, including retired pages (send those to the closest relevant page, not just the homepage).
• Implement redirects in WordPress using a plugin like Redirection or Rank Math's built-in manager, or at the server level in .htaccess for speed.
• Avoid redirect chains (A to B to C). Point each old URL directly to its final destination.

If you're building the map for the first time, our guide on how to create a 301 redirect map for a website migration walks through the exact format and edge cases. Getting this right is what separates a migration that holds its rankings from one that loses months of traffic.

Step 5: Test, launch, and monitor

Before switching DNS, test everything on staging: forms submit, checkout processes a real test transaction, course enrollment and content access work, pages render on mobile, and redirects resolve correctly. Run a fresh crawl of the staging site to catch broken links and missing pages.

To launch, point your domain's DNS to the new WordPress host (this is also when you cancel or downgrade Kajabi, but keep it active until you've confirmed everything transferred). After go-live:

• Submit a new XML sitemap in Google Search Console and request re-crawling.
• Spot-check your top 20 old URLs to confirm every redirect fires correctly.
• Watch Search Console's coverage and crawl reports and Analytics for the first 4 to 8 weeks; some ranking fluctuation is normal, but a steep drop signals a redirect or indexing problem to fix immediately.
• Keep the redirect map live indefinitely, don't remove redirects after launch.

A managed website migration service handles this monitoring phase so problems get caught in days, not after a quarter of lost traffic.

Timeline and cost: what to realistically expect

A simple Kajabi-to-WordPress move (a marketing site with a blog and a few pages) can take 2 to 4 weeks. Add courses, memberships, and checkout, and it's more realistically 6 to 12 weeks, because rebuilding an LMS, migrating student access, and reconnecting payments each add complexity.

On cost, a DIY migration costs mainly your time plus hosting and plugin licenses (a few hundred dollars a year). A professionally managed migration typically runs from a few thousand dollars for a content site up into five figures for a large course business with custom functionality. At an $80/hour rate, most standard blog-and-pages migrations land in a predictable, mid-range budget, while the value is avoiding the far larger cost of lost rankings. Whichever route you choose, the priorities are the same: preserve content, match URLs, map every redirect, and monitor closely after launch. Explore our full website development options if you want the rebuild and the migration handled together.