How to Migrate from WordPress to Kajabi

WordPress is a flexible, plugin-driven CMS, while Kajabi is an all-in-one platform built for course creators, coaches, and membership businesses. Moving from one to the other is not a simple import job. Kajabi has no direct "WordPress importer," so a migration is really a controlled rebuild: you extract your content, recreate pages and posts inside Kajabi's page builder, load your courses and offers, and then carefully preserve the URLs and redirects that hold your search rankings together.

The businesses that make this move are usually tired of maintaining a stack of plugins for membership, email, checkout, and course delivery when Kajabi bundles all of it. That consolidation is real, but it comes with trade-offs you should understand before you touch DNS. This guide walks through exactly what changes, what breaks, and how to complete the migration without tanking the organic traffic you have spent years building.

If you would rather hand the technical lift to a team that does this weekly, our website migration services cover the full process end to end. Otherwise, here is how to do it yourself.

Why businesses move from WordPress to Kajabi

Kajabi's appeal is consolidation. Instead of stitching together WooCommerce or a membership plugin, an LMS plugin like LearnDash, an email tool like Mailchimp, and a page builder like Elementor, you get courses, memberships, checkout, email marketing, funnels, and hosting under one login and one bill. For a solo educator or a small coaching business, that reduction in moving parts is worth a lot.

• No plugin maintenance: Kajabi is fully hosted, so there are no updates, security patches, or plugin conflicts to manage.
• Built-in course and membership delivery: Video hosting, drip scheduling, quizzes, and student progress tracking are native, not bolted on.
• Integrated payments and email: Offers, upsells, and email sequences live in the same system as your content.
• Predictable performance: No shared-host slowdowns or caching plugin tuning.

The cost is flexibility. WordPress lets you build almost anything; Kajabi keeps you inside its templates and structure. If your site relies on complex custom functionality, weigh whether a hosted platform fits before committing.

What changes and what breaks

Be honest with yourself about what will not survive the move. Kajabi is a different system, and several WordPress conventions have no equivalent.

• Plugins and shortcodes: Every WordPress plugin stops working. Shortcodes left in your post content will display as raw text and must be removed or rebuilt with Kajabi blocks.
• URL structure: WordPress permalinks like /blog/my-post/ often differ from Kajabi's blog paths. Mismatched URLs are the single biggest SEO risk in this migration.
• Design and theme: Your WordPress theme does not transfer. You will rebuild the look inside a Kajabi theme, so expect visual differences, especially on custom-coded pages.
• Forms and integrations: Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, and similar tools are replaced by Kajabi forms or third-party embeds.
• Custom post types and advanced fields: ACF data, custom taxonomies, and directory-style content have no native home in Kajabi and usually need rethinking.

Standard blog posts, static pages, and media generally migrate fine with manual effort. The heavier your customization, the more of this becomes a rebuild rather than a transfer.

Step 1: Export and inventory your WordPress content

Start by cataloging everything so nothing gets lost. Go to Tools > Export in your WordPress admin and download the XML file for all content. This gives you a full record of posts, pages, and metadata even though Kajabi cannot import it directly.

• Export a full list of live URLs. Crawl the site with Screaming Frog or pull your sitemap.xml to capture every indexed page.
• Record each post's title, body, images, publish date, meta title, and meta description (export these from Yoast or Rank Math).
• Download your media library, ideally via FTP from /wp-content/uploads/, so you keep original image files.
• Note which pages earn the most organic traffic in Google Analytics and Search Console. These are your priority pages to preserve exactly.

This inventory becomes the master checklist that drives every later step, and it doubles as your redirect map source.

Step 2: Set up and build in Kajabi

Inside Kajabi, choose a theme and configure your site structure before you paste in content. Recreate your primary navigation, brand colors, fonts, and logo so the new site feels consistent. Then rebuild content in the right places:

• Blog posts: Use Kajabi's blog feature. Recreate each post, paste the cleaned body text, re-upload images, and set the title and slug to match your old permalink where possible.
• Static pages: Rebuild home, about, services, and contact pages with Kajabi's page builder sections.
• Courses and memberships: Create Products, add modules and lessons, upload video, and configure drip and access rules.
• Offers and checkout: Set up Offers to replace WooCommerce products, and connect Stripe or PayPal.

Set your custom domain in Settings > Domain early so you can preview real URLs. Matching your Kajabi slugs to your old WordPress slugs wherever the format allows will dramatically reduce the number of redirects you need later. For complex functionality Kajabi cannot handle, our custom development team can build the pieces the platform leaves out.

Step 3: Map and implement 301 redirects

This is where rankings are won or lost. Any old URL that changes must point to its new location with a permanent 301 redirect, which passes the accumulated link authority and tells Google the page has moved for good.

• Build a spreadsheet with two columns: old WordPress URL and new Kajabi URL. Use the inventory from Step 1 so nothing is missed.
• Match each page to its closest equivalent. Redirect retired pages to the most relevant surviving page, never to a generic 404 or the homepage in bulk.
• Kajabi supports 301 redirects natively in Settings > Site Details > Redirects (or the marketing settings, depending on your plan). Add each mapping there.
• Watch for trailing-slash and www-vs-non-www differences, which quietly create duplicate URLs.

Our 301 redirect map guide walks through building this document correctly, and our website migration SEO checklist covers the on-page details, like carrying over meta titles and image alt text, that people forget under launch pressure.

Step 4: Switch DNS and launch

Once every page is rebuilt and your redirect map is ready, connect your domain. In your domain registrar, update the DNS records to the values Kajabi provides, usually a CNAME or A record for your custom domain. DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate globally, so plan the cutover for a low-traffic window.

• Keep your WordPress site live until DNS fully propagates so nothing goes dark mid-switch.
• Confirm SSL is active on the Kajabi domain before you announce the launch.
• Point your Google Search Console and Analytics properties at the new setup and verify ownership again.

Step 5: Test, submit, and monitor

Launch is the start of monitoring, not the end of the project. Test aggressively in the first days and watch Search Console for weeks.

• Spot-check 20 to 30 of your highest-traffic old URLs and confirm each 301-redirects to the correct new page.
• Generate a new sitemap.xml in Kajabi and submit it in Search Console, then request indexing on your key pages.
• Test every course enrollment, checkout, and form as a real user to confirm payments and access work.
• Watch the Coverage and Pages reports for a spike in 404s or crawl errors and fix any mapping gaps quickly.
• Expect a short ranking dip for a few weeks; clean redirects and matching content usually recover it. A prolonged drop signals a broken redirect somewhere.

You can review the broader principles behind a clean rebuild in our overview of website development services.

Timeline and cost

A realistic small-business migration, meaning a handful of pages, one or two courses, and a modest blog, takes two to four weeks of focused work. Larger sites with hundreds of posts, multiple membership tiers, and heavy custom functionality can run six to ten weeks once you account for content rebuilding, redirect mapping, and QA.

Kajabi's own subscription typically runs from roughly $150 per month on entry plans up to several hundred for higher tiers, which is often more than WordPress hosting but replaces several separate tool subscriptions. For done-for-you migration labor at $80/hour, most projects land somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars depending on page count and complexity. The largest cost is almost always the manual content rebuild, since there is no automated importer, so budget your hours around how much content you are moving rather than the platform fee itself.