Thinking about migrating your WordPress site to WordPress.com?
Our expert team can do the moving for you, while your live site remains unaffected – at no cost and with 50% off your first year on our Business plan.
The migration process typically takes 2-3 business days. Once it’s complete, we’ll guide you through connecting your domain and getting your new site up and running. To get started, just drop in your site details and pick the “Do it for me” option during the migration setup below. We’ll take it from there!
If you have a website built with WordPress on another hosting provider that you want to move to WordPress.com, you can migrate it to WordPress.com using the steps in this guide. These steps will migrate your existing self-hosted WordPress.org site, including your content, media, plugins, and theme, to your new WordPress.com site.
In this guide
To follow the steps in this guide, you will need:
- Your source site: a WordPress site with any other hosting provider (referred to as a self-hosted or WordPress.org site).
- Multisite installations are not supported.
- Your destination site: a WordPress.com website with our Business or Commerce plan. This site will be erased and replaced with the site that you import.
- All incompatible plugins must be deactivated on the source site.
Importing your source sites involves two steps:
- Copy the migration key from your WordPress.com site.
- Add the migration key to the source site and start the migration.
To copy the migration key from your WordPress.com site, take the following steps:
- Log into your new WordPress.com account or site (or create one here).
- In the WordPress.com site’s dashboard, navigate to Tools → Import.
- Under “I want to import content from:” select the WordPress option:
- Choose the “Migrate site” option to import everything, including your self-hosted site’s content, plugins, users, and customizations.
- On the next screen, choose the “I’ll do it myself” option.
- If you choose the “Do it for me” option our Happiness Engineers will be reaching out to you at your account email address to help you migrate to WordPress.com.
- Click the “Next” button until you’re given your migration key, and click the “Copy” button to copy it.
In this step, you will install the Migrate Guru plugin on your source site (also known as your self-hosted or WordPress.org site). You will use the key you copied in Step 1 to begin the migration.
Follow these steps to install Migrate Guru on the source site and begin the migration:
- Log into the WP Admin dashboard of the source site.
- Install and activate the Migrate Guru plugin.
- On the left sidebar of the WP-Admin dashboard, click “Migrate Guru” to visit the plugin’s settings page.
- Add your email address and check the box to agree to the terms.
- Click the “Migrate” button.
- Select WordPress.com from the hosting options.
- Enter the migration key you copied earlier into the “Migrate Guru Migration Key” field.
- If you use files or data other than the standard WordPress structures, you can include them in the migration by clicking the + buttons in the “Add Folders” or “Add Tables” sections.
- Click on the button labeled “Migrate” to start the migration.
- Wait for the migration to complete. This can take a while, even on small sites.
When the import completes, review the site to ensure it looks how you expect.
If any WordPress core files (such as wp-config.php and functions.php) on the source site were modified, those changes wouldn’t be migrated to the destination site. The migrated site on WordPress.com will have the most recent version of WordPress core.
If something is not right, message us and let us know you completed a migration. We will review your website and make any necessary fixes to ensure a seamless migration.
You might also want to do any of the following:
- Add a domain to your site.
- Get familiar with the features included in your WordPress.com plan.
- Deactivate any incompatible plugins on the imported site.
- Move stats and subscribers by contacting us with the URLs of both sites.
