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 copy 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.
If any WordPress core files (such as wp-config.php and functions.php) on the source site were modified, those changes won’t be migrated to the destination site. The migrated site on WordPress.com will have the most recent version of WordPress core.
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.
Each step is explained below.
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.
- If using WP-Admin, you must then click the “Get started” button to visit the WordPress.com guided importer:
- Under “I want to import content from” choose the WordPress option from the list of platforms:
- 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:
Follow these steps to install the Migrate to WordPress.com plugin on the source site (also known as your self-hosted or WordPress.org site) and begin the migration:
- Log into the WP Admin dashboard of the source site.
- Install and activate the Migrate to WordPress.com plugin.
- On the left sidebar of the WP-Admin dashboard, click “Migrate to WordPress.com” to visit the plugin’s settings page:
- Add your email address and check the box to agree to the terms.
- Click the “Continue” button.
- Enter the migration key you copied earlier into the “Migration Key” field.
- Click on the button labeled “Start migration” to begin importing a copy of the site to WordPress.com.
- Wait for the migration to complete. This can take a while, even on small sites.
Your WordPress.com site will have an example.wpcomstaging.com address for you to review the site as a visitor. When the migration is completed, review the new WordPress.com site to ensure it looks how you expect.
Once you’re ready to launch the new version of your site hosted on WordPress.com, follow the steps to connect or transfer your domain to your new WordPress.com site and launch your site.
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:
- 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.
