How to Migrate From Bitrix CMS to WordPress: A 6-Step Guide

If you have been running your website on Bitrix CMS and things are starting to feel more complicated than they should, you are not alone. Whether it is the annual licensing costs, the steep learning curve, or the limited global developer community, many businesses have already made the move. This guide will walk you through exactly how to migrate from Bitrix CMS to WordPress in six clear steps.

TL;DR: Bitrix to WordPress Migration

• Bitrix CMS is a commercial, module-based platform popular in Russian-speaking markets, but its licensing structure and complexity push many teams toward WordPress.

• WordPress is free, open-source, and supported by the world’s largest CMS community, making it easier to find developers, themes, and support.

• Migrating from a Bitrix CMS site to WordPress involves exporting content, setting up a WordPress environment, importing data, rebuilding templates, and configuring redirects.

• Proprietary Bitrix features like Infoblocks, CRM forms, and custom modules need WordPress equivalents before you start.

• Protecting your SEO requires careful URL mapping and 301 redirects before going live.

• For complex Bitrix sites, working with a WordPress migration specialist significantly reduces risk.

What is Bitrix CMS, and Who Uses it?

1C-Bitrix is a comprehensive enterprise CMS developed by the Russian software company 1C. It is particularly popular among medium to large organizations that need a unified platform for website management, intranet solutions, and online stores.

The platform uses modules to manage business processes, analytics, sales catalogs, CRM forms, document flow, and mailings. Users can also purchase additional modules from the Bitrix marketplace to extend functionality.

The platform comes in five license tiers: Start, Standard, Small Business, Business, and Enterprise. The Start license covers simple websites. Small Business supports online stores. Enterprise integrates online sales across all of a company’s channels and infrastructure.

For businesses operating in Eastern Europe and Russia, Bitrix has historically made sense. Organizations that want global scale, less vendor dependency, and broader developer access often choose WordPress for long-term growth.

Why Are Businesses Moving Away From Bitrix CMS?

Several factors push businesses to migrate from Bitrix CMS to a WordPress website, and they go well beyond simple cost comparisons.

The Licensing and Cost Problem

Bitrix licenses are available at various price points, but the renewal structure changed significantly from March 2022. Users previously paid 25% of the license cost annually to renew.

Now they pay the full amount each year. For small and medium businesses, this makes an already paid platform considerably more expensive to maintain.

WordPress, in contrast, is free and open-source. You save on licensing fees and can redirect that budget to design, marketing, or new functionality. There is also a free plan available for basic WordPress.com setups, making the barrier to entry essentially zero.

The Developer Ecosystem Gap

WordPress has a much larger developer and user community than Bitrix CMS. This gives you access to far more resources, including tutorials, support forums, and third-party plugins and themes.

Finding a Bitrix specialist outside of Eastern Europe is a narrow search. Finding a WordPress developer anywhere in the world takes minutes.

In addition, more developers building on WordPress means frequent updates, faster bug fixes, and a constantly expanding library of plugins and customization options. That kind of momentum simply does not exist globally for Bitrix.

Limited Flexibility for Growing Businesses

Bitrix works well when your business needs fit neatly inside its packaged structure. However, as soon as you need to edit content in ways the platform does not natively support, you hit walls fast.

WordPress gives you genuine flexibility. You can customize almost every aspect of your WordPress site, integrate third-party tools, create custom fields, and manage users without depending on a specialist every time something needs to change.

Should You Migrate Yourself or Hire a Professional for Bitrix to WordPress Migration?

This decision depends on your site’s complexity, not your confidence level.

If your Bitrix site has straightforward content, a manageable number of pages, and no heavily customized modules, a well-organized internal team can handle the migration with the right guidance.

However, if your site extensively uses Bitrix’s proprietary Infoblock system, runs CRM forms, has custom payment integrations, or has accumulated years of content and leads, the migration quickly becomes technically demanding.

Professional WordPress migration teams that specialize in Bitrix to WordPress transitions work from either direct access to your Bitrix website or from a database backup file, building a tailored plan suited to your specific content structure.

For e-commerce sites or large corporate portals built on Bitrix, this kind of specialist support is not just convenient; it’s essential to avoid data loss and SEO damage.

Seahawk Media handles Bitrix CMS to WordPress migrations end-to-end, from content mapping and database export to redirect configuration and post-launch SEO checks.

If your site is complex, reaching out to Seahawk Media before you start can save significant time and prevent the most expensive mistakes. Contact the team today for a free migration assessment.

Before You Start: Pre-Migration Checklist

Preparation separates a smooth migration from a chaotic one. Before you touch a single file, work through these steps carefully.

• Start with a full content audit of your Bitrix site. Document every page, post, product, media file, Infoblock, CRM form, and custom module currently in use. This gives you a clear picture of what needs to move and what you can clean up before migration begins.

• Open Google Search Console and identify your highest-traffic pages. These are the URLs you cannot afford to lose. Their structure, metadata, and content must carry over cleanly to your WordPress site.

From there, work through these preparation steps before moving forward:

• Choose a WordPress hosting provider and set up a staging environment before touching your live Bitrix site. Managed WordPress hosts handle performance and security at scale, which matters if your Bitrix site currently receives significant traffic.

• Document your existing URL structure precisely. Small differences between your old Bitrix URLs and new WordPress URLs can cause ranking drops if you do not configure redirects correctly before launch.

• Back up your entire Bitrix site independently, including your database, files, and portal settings. Create a full backup so you can quickly restore your data if anything is lost during the transfer, without having to start over.

• Identify WordPress equivalents for every Bitrix feature your site currently relies on. Infoblocks, web forms, CRM integrations, and custom data structures all require plugin replacements to be confirmed before migration begins, not after.

Steps to Migrate From Bitrix CMS to WordPress

Here is the full migration process from start to finish.

Step 1: Export Your Content From Bitrix CMS

Bitrix CMS stores content in a proprietary module-based structure. It does not produce a standard WordPress-compatible XML export directly. To extract your content, you have two main options.

• The first option is to use an automated migration tool like CMS2CMS, which supports migrating Bitrix content to WordPress and handles posts, pages, images, and user data.

• The second option is a manual database export, where your developer extracts content directly from the Bitrix MySQL database and transforms it into a WordPress-importable format.

For e-commerce sites built on Bitrix’s Infoblock system, the manual database approach gives you more control over how product data maps to WordPress and WooCommerce fields. Whichever method you choose, confirm your backup is complete before you begin.

Step 2: Set Up Your WordPress Environment

Install WordPress on your staging domain and configure your foundational settings before importing anything. Set your permalink structure carefully, since it determines your new URL format.

• You want it to match your Bitrix URL structure as closely as possible to minimize redirect work later.

• WordPress gives you customizable permalinks out of the box, which is a significant advantage over Bitrix’s more rigid URL management.

• At this stage, install Rank Math. Both are actively maintained plugins that manage metadata, XML sitemaps, and redirects throughout the migration.

Also, install WooCommerce now if your Bitrix site includes an online store, so your WooCommerce store has the correct data structure in place for the product import.

Step 3: Import Your Content into WordPress

Once your content is exported and converted to a WordPress-compatible XML file, go to Tools > Import in your WordPress dashboard.

• Select the WordPress importer, upload your file, and map authors during the import process.

• For large sites, contact your hosting provider to temporarily increase the PHP memory limit and maximum execution time.

This prevents timeout errors during the import, which are common on content-heavy Bitrix sites with years of pages, products, and media references.

Step 4: Migrate Your Media Files and Data

Bitrix stores images and files in its own directory structure, separate from the content database.

• After your content import, check your WordPress media library to confirm which files were imported and which were not.

• For missing media, download files directly from your Bitrix server via FTP and re-upload them to WordPress in batches.

Once the media files are in place, run a search-and-replace in your database using the Better Search Replace plugin (actively maintained) to update any hardcoded file paths that still reference your old Bitrix domain.

Step 5: Rebuild Templates and Recreate Custom Functionality

Bitrix’s page layouts and custom modules do not directly translate into WordPress themes.

• Choose a WordPress theme that matches your design direction and rebuild key page layouts using either the Gutenberg block editor or Elementor. Both are actively maintained and widely supported across the WordPress ecosystem.

• For Bitrix Infoblocks that previously managed structured content such as product catalogs, news listings, or custom datasets, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is the most capable and actively maintained WordPress solution for recreating that content without heavy custom development.

• For web or contact forms that run through Bitrix’s built-in form system, WPForms is a robust, actively maintained alternative. It integrates cleanly with WordPress, third-party CRM systems, and marketing automation tools.

If you need a CRM system to replace Bitrix24 CRM functionality on your new WordPress site, tools like HubSpot’s customer relationship management integrate directly with WordPress through official plugins and support lead tracking, new lead capture, and sales team workflows without leaving your site.

Step 6: Set Up 301 Redirects and Go Live

Before switching your DNS, build a complete redirect map. Every Bitrix URL that changes in WordPress needs a corresponding 301 redirect.

• Use the Redirection plugin, which is actively maintained and supports both simple and complex redirect rules, all from your WordPress dashboard without requiring server access.

• Work through your redirect map methodically, starting with your highest-traffic pages from the Google Search Console audit you completed earlier.

Test every redirect on your staging site before going live. Once you have confirmed all redirects are working correctly, update your DNS to point to the new WordPress site.

How to Protect Your SEO During the Bitrix to WordPress Migration?

Moving from Bitrix CMS to WordPress fundamentally changes how your site is structured, and search engines notice. With the right preparation, however, you can protect most of your SEO equity through the transition.

Audit Your Top Bitrix Pages First

Before migration, export your top-performing URLs from Google Search Console by clicks and impressions. These pages carry the most SEO value. Match their URLs exactly in WordPress and preserve their title tags, meta descriptions, and heading structures during the import. Your website’s search visibility depends on getting this step right.

Map Every Changed URL to a 301 Redirect

Build your full redirect map before going live. For every Bitrix URL that changes in WordPress, create a 301 redirect pointing to the new equivalent. The Redirection plugin manages this at scale directly from the WordPress dashboard. Skipping this step is the single fastest way to damage your website’s performance in search results after launch.

Resubmit Your Sitemap After Launch

After your WordPress site goes live, generate a fresh XML sitemap with Rank Math, then submit it to Google Search Console. This tells search engines to recrawl your updated URL structure, accelerating the reindexing process and helping your rankings recover faster.

Wrapping Up

Migrating from Bitrix CMS to WordPress gives your team more control, better access to global developers, and a platform built to grow alongside your business.

The process takes planning, especially around content structure, web forms, CRM integration, and SEO preservation, but the result is a WordPress website that is faster to manage, easier to customize, and far less expensive to maintain over time.

If your Bitrix site is complex or your business depends on zero downtime, Seahawk Media has the expertise to handle every stage of the migration. Get in touch with us today.

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