How To Migrate From WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Key Takeaways

today we're showcasing monster insights many bloggers will start a website on wordpress.com just to see how it goes and to test out blogging the problem is they quickly realize the limitations of wordpress.com including not being able to add their own plugins that they want or use themes that they want and then there's also some limitations and revenue that you can earn so in this video I'll show you exactly how to properly move from wordpress.com to wordpress.org and we'll cover it step by step so you can get up and running quickly now in moving over from WordPress .c to wordpress.org there are a couple of things that you're going to need the first one is you need a domain so instead of your website. wordpress.com you're going to need a domain like your website.com instead the other thing you're going to need is hosting basically this is you being able to rent space on a server and there are several hosting companies to choose from okay I'm going to go through the step-by-step process for those of you who want but if you are one of those who you just want it migrated and you don't want to deal with it yourself or those of you who don't want to do it and we get this question all the time of can you just do this for me can you just migrate my website for me and to say yes we can do that we have a page in the description below that you can check out on how we will actually migrate the system for you we have support team who will gladly move and migrate from wordpress.com to wordpress.org the only caveat is you'll want to make sure that you purchase the hosting through our affiliate link we'll get a commission for that but that's to pay for the time of migrating it for you so check out all the details in the description below and for everyone else who's ready to do it on your own let's dive in okay if you've decided that you're going to set all of this up yourself then you'll need to get started with having your own domain that is your website.com as well as your own Hosting account as we talked about before we recommend blue host to get started we'll have a link in the description below that you can click on or simply go to wpbeginner.com slre blost and then you'll be taken to this page where you can click on the get started now green button and from here you want to choose the account or the plan that you want to work with if you know you're just going to use one website then the basic is very economical way to get started if you think that you might have a few more websites then consider doing the plus I usually do the plus but to get started if you want to keep cost low and go with the basic whichever one you choose you want to select it and then from here you want to create the new domain since you're getting a free domain with this who want to pick one and when you click on next it'll tell you whether or not it's available if it's available you'll get a big green button like this if it's not available then they'll come up with a few other suggestions that you can possibly use now you want to go through and fill out the account information scrolling down you want to make sure you pick out how long you want the account to go for the longer you go the more of a discount you get if you notice you're also getting a free domain registration through the link and free SSL certificate and SSL certificate is super important nowadays for keeping your site encrypted and secure now scrolling down with the package extras a lot of times we'll just uncheck a lot of these because you probably don't need those right now anything that you do need there's usually a better option or a better plugin with when WordPress that you can choose and then once you go through all this fill out your billing information acknowledge that you've read and agreed to the auto renewal terms and then you can click submit to move on to the next step once you click submit it will go through the process of creating your Hosting account it'll also go ahead and create the WordPress installation it'll create the website for you as well and you'll see something like this where you can log into WordPress so we're going to click on log to Wordpress so we can go and see what our site looks like and this is the back end of your website and what we can do is take a look in incognito mode and this is what your website looks like on the front basically you have a coming soon and now what we need to do is go ahead and get the data ready to export from our wordpress.com to bring it over here so now we need to head over to our wordpress.com dashboard and we need to export the data so to do that you can look on the left under Tools we'll expand that and we want to click on export and then from here we have a couple of different options basically we want to export all content so we're going to click click on export all and it might take a little bit of time for it to gather up all the information and once it does you'll see a little download link you'll also get an email that has the download link there as well so let's go ahead and download the file and we'll leave this open but now we can go back to our new website so that we can import this information okay now we're on our WordPress admin area we need to go to tools same as we had before but this time we want to import so under Tools import and then scrolling down we're looking for WordPress this is the tool that we need to use to import and we'll install that and let's go ahead and click run importer as well from here we need to choose file and what it's looking for is an XML file what we just downloaded is a ZIP file so we need to do a little bit of clean up on that so we need to go to where we just downloaded it this is the zip file that I just downloaded so I'm going to extract it all and now we have an XML file that we can add to the website so going back to the dashboard I'm going to choose file go to that XML file that I just extracted and now we can click upload file and import and once it does that it will find all the authors that were a part of your WordPress site and you can either create a new user with login information or simply assign them to an existing one we'll go ahead and assign it to our existing one here you also want to make sure you you click download and import file attachments otherwise you won't won't get your your media uploaded to your site so make sure you do that as well once you have all that set up we can click submit and now it will go through read that XML file and import all of your posts and because it's importing media as well as all the file information it could take a little while once everything's imported you can take a look at your website and see how it looks scrolling through these are all of my pages and everything looks pretty good you see I even have my images those were all ported over as well and then when I go back to my page if I go to posts then I'll see all of my posts here as well now we need to do a little bit of cleanup on our wordpress.com site and these are pretty crucial decision that you need to make if you don't really care about sending people from your wordpress.com to your wordpress.org site then you can simply go over and basically turn it off or set it to private if you have a lot of content or if you have a lot of blog posts that are in search results then you'll want to make sure that you do the next step but if you're just turning it off you can go back over to your WordPress dashboard of your wordpress.com site and you can go down to manage settings and then under settings you want to see look for privacy and it should it should say public what you want to do is set this to private that your site is only visible to you and logged in members that you approve of and everyone else will see a simply a login screen so you can set this to private and then nobody body can access the website now this is where the other part comes in is then they also won't know where your new home is or where your new website is and so if you have a lot of readers that come to your site you have a lot of visitors you want to give them a way to find you and so we recommend doing a redirect if you are doing a redirect keep this as public don't change that we'll go ahead and save that so under the same settings area we're looking for site address and we want to do redirect this redirect link so click on that and then you want to send the new address here now the unfortunate thing is the redirect will cost $13 a year but if you already have a lot of readership a lot of items in search results like I said that this is actually really good and economical way to keep that traffic coming to your new site we recommend probably doing this for about two years and that would give all your readers time to adjust it would also give Google and other search engines to find get give them time to adjust to where the new site is so simply put in your new domain name and then when you click go It'll ask you to go ahead and pay and all that and then it'll be ready to redirect for you once that's finished then you're all done and now you can go through and adjust and tweak your actual website we also have an 18 most important things that you need to do after installing WordPress we'll have that link in the description below there's just some things that you want to do to make sure that your website looks good and inviting for your visitors one of the main things that you'll want to do for your new website is to install something like monster insights with monster insights you know exactly how much traffic is coming your website because it connects your website to Google analytics monster insights brings all of the data in overview report it tells you how many sessions how many page views your site has had you can also see the average session duration bounce rate device breakdown user new user versus returning your top countries and top referrals and so much more and the great thing about moner Insight is you can get started for free but once you're ready to upgrade and understand more data about your website then you can upgrade to their lat plan latest plan by going to monster insights.com and make sure you use promo code wpb VIP to get the best discount on Monster insights now that you've migrated everything make sure you check out this video next where I walk you through step by step on how to set up your own website we'll cover things like changing out a theme setting up a menu and so much more so make sure you check that video out and I'll see you over there