Exporting a Hostinger Builder Site to WordPress: What Moves

You can now export a Hostinger website builder site to WordPress, and that sentence would have been false for most of this product's life. Hostinger documents an official path that moves regular pages, text, images and other files across. It is a real improvement on the category norm, which for years was a shrug and a suggestion to copy and paste. It is also considerably less than a site migration, and the gap between those two things is where people get hurt.

What transfers

Hostinger's wording is that you can export regular pages, texts, images and other files. In practice that is your content in the plainest sense: the words you wrote, the pictures you uploaded, and the page structure holding them. If your site is a brochure — a handful of pages of copy and photographs — that is the substance of it, and getting it out intact is genuinely useful.

What does not transfer

Hostinger is admirably explicit about the exclusions, and the list is long. You cannot export website styles and layout, the online store, integrations, forms, collected form submissions, or SEO settings.

Read that list against the time you spent building. Styles and layout is the design — the thing you fiddled with for a weekend. The online store is your product catalogue and checkout configuration. Collected form submissions are your enquiry history, which for many small businesses is the most commercially valuable data on the site. SEO settings are the titles and descriptions you wrote for every page. All of it stays behind.

So the honest framing is that this exports your content, not your website. You will arrive in WordPress with your words and pictures and will need to rebuild the appearance from scratch, re-enter your metadata, reconstruct any forms, and — if you were selling — start the shop again. Budget for that properly rather than discovering it halfway through.

The prerequisites

The export has conditions, and missing one is the usual reason it fails rather than anything mysterious. Have all of these in place before you begin:

• WordPress 6.5 or newer on the destination site.
• The destination domain fully propagated — a half-resolved DNS change will produce confusing failures.
• WordPress application passwords enabled, which is how the transfer authenticates.
• All plugins deactivated on the destination before you run it. Reactivate afterwards.
• Permalink structure set to post name, which also happens to be the sensible setting to keep.

The plugin-deactivation requirement is the one people skip, and it is the most likely cause of a partial or mangled import. Caching and security plugins in particular will interfere with an authenticated bulk write.

The warning that matters most

If you are moving to something other than WordPress, Hostinger's own instruction is blunter: delete the builder website and set up a new one from scratch on the other platform. Attached to that instruction is a sentence worth reading twice — a deleted website cannot be restored, and all its content is lost permanently.

Export. Verify the export. Take your own copy of everything. Only then delete.

Verifying means actually opening the destination and checking that every page arrived, that the images resolved rather than appearing as broken links, and that nothing was silently truncated. Long pages are the usual casualty — check the bottom of each one, not just the top. Separately, save your own copy of the things the export will not move: screenshot every page at full length so you have a record of the design, download your form submissions if there is any way to, and copy your page titles and descriptions into a spreadsheet. Ten minutes of that beforehand is worth an afternoon of reconstruction afterwards, and there is no second attempt once the original is gone.

What the move actually involves

Set expectations properly and this is an afternoon, not a project. The export itself is quick once the prerequisites are satisfied — it is a transfer of content over an authenticated connection, not a database migration. What takes the time is everything after it, and the honest sequence runs roughly like this.

Your pages arrive in WordPress as content without styling, inheriting whatever theme is active. That is disorienting the first time you see it — the words are all present and the site looks nothing like the one you had. Then you choose a theme, rebuild the page layouts, re-enter every title and meta description from the spreadsheet you made, recreate your contact forms with a plugin, and reconnect analytics and anything else that was wired in. For a six-page brochure site that is a comfortable day's work. For something larger, scale accordingly.

One structural decision is worth making deliberately rather than by default: whether to reproduce the old design or take the opportunity to improve it. Reproducing it exactly is slower than it sounds, because you are reverse-engineering someone else's template from screenshots. Many people find it faster and better to pick a good WordPress theme and adapt their content to it. The design was never portable; treating the move as a redesign rather than a restoration removes the frustration of chasing a pixel match you cannot reach. It also means the hours go into something you will keep rather than into recreating a layout you were already prepared to leave behind, which is the more useful way to spend a day either way.

What this means before you buy

The existence of an export changes the lock-in conversation without ending it. Your writing is portable, which is the part nobody could replace. Your design is not, which is the part you will most want back. For a local business whose site is text and photographs, that is a reasonable trade. For a designer, a studio, or anyone building for a client, it is the reason to choose something else — the fit guide goes through who that applies to.

It is also worth knowing the exit route before the renewal date arrives rather than after. Premium renews at $10.99 a month against a $2.99 introductory rate, and the worst time to work out what leaving involves is the week a four-times price increase lands. The export takes an afternoon when planned and considerably longer in a panic. The full product assessment is in the Hostinger Website Builder review.