Today under Mark’s Free Technical Support, someone asked me how to migrate a free WordPress.com website to a paid WordPress.org installation. It’s simple, and I’ll show you why.
WordPress.com is when WordPress gives you free hosting space to run a basic website and helps you start your own internet presence. But if you want to get into e-commerce or look more professional, you’ll eventually want to switch to your own domain using WordPress.org.
After all, markoneill.org looks MUCH more professional than, say, markoneill.org
But if you’ve created a lot of posts and pages on your WordPress.com site, how can you easily transfer all of that to your new domain without losing anything? Fortunately, WordPress has taken care of this.
First stop – WordPress.com website
I haven’t used WordPress.com for a long time, but for the purposes of this demo, I created a test site at markbooksblog.wordpress.com. We’re going to move all of this to my regular domain markoneill.org/wordpresscom.
After logging into your WordPress.com dashboard, go to Tools on the left toolbar and select Export.
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If you plan to export your entire site, select the first option, Export Your Content. This will also bring the media library with it, so doing both is not necessary here.
If for any reason you would like to download your media library separately, it will be delivered as a compressed TAR file. You can open it with the free 7-Zip
You will now be informed that the download link has been sent to the email address registered with your WordPress account. Go there to download the Zip file.
After downloading the Zip file, open it and extract the single “xml” file from it.
Terminal Two – Shiny New WordPress.Org Domain
I am assuming you have already installed WordPress.org on your domain. How to set it up manually is beyond the scope of this article, and in many cases, web providers offer automated solutions to set it up for you. If in doubt, just contact your hosting company’s customer service department.
So, in the fresh WordPress installation I just made, go to Tools– Import– WordPress. Click Install Now.
After a few seconds, the Install Now link will change to Launch Importer. Click on it.
Click the Browse button and navigate to the XML file on your computer. Now click on Upload File and Import to start adding all posts, pages, tags, etc.
Since my WordPress.com site is brand new with almost nothing on it, the import process took seconds. But if you have hundreds of posts and pages, expect it to take a while.
It will now ask you to assign your WordPress.com blog posts to a specific user in your new WordPress.org domain. Select or create a user. Decide if you want to import the attached files (I’d say yes), then click Submit.
Eventually, he will tell you that everything is ready and you can now browse your site.
What should you do with the old site?
I can’t tell you what to do with the old site on wordpress.com as it is obviously up to you, but I can tell you that Google will treat it as “duplicate content” and penalize both of your sites accordingly.
So my personal recommendation (which obviously doesn’t have to be followed) is to delete the old site and let Google’s algorithm update your links to point to the new site.
The update could take weeks, but better than Google handing out a red card for two sets of duplicate web pages. And besides, your visitors on the web will be endlessly confused if you see two identical sites!
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