Import an Entire WordPress Site

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For a short time, we’re offering migrations from your existing WordPress site to WordPress.com for free! Sign up for a new Creator or Entrepreneur plan and our expert Happiness Engineers will handle the migration for you.

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If you have a website built with WordPress on another hosting provider that you want to move to WordPress.com, you can use our Import Everything option. This will copy your existing self-hosted WordPress.org site to your new WordPress.com site, including your content, media, plugins, and theme.

In this guide

1. Prerequisites
2. Import from Self-Hosted WordPress
3. After the Import

Prerequisites

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 Creator or Entrepreneur plan.
• Jetpack version 7.9 or higher activated on the source site.
• An admin account on both sites (source and destination) that is connected via Jetpack on both sites.
• All incompatible plugins deactivated on the self-hosted site.

Import from Self-Hosted WordPress

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By importing a site using this method, the entire contents of the WordPress.com site will be erased and replaced with the site that you import.

To import a WordPress website to WordPress.com, take the following steps:

1. Log into your new WordPress.com account or site (or create one here).
2. In the WordPress.com site’s dashboard, navigate to Tools → Import.
3. Under “I want to import content from:” select WordPress.

4. On the next screen, enter the public site address of your self-hosted WordPress site:

5. Click the Continue button. In the background, the importer will ensure your source site has all the necessary prerequisites.
6. The option to import Everything will be selected by default. Click Continue to move to the next screen:

7. On the next screen, review the URLs of your source and destination site and read the information explaining that the content, users, themes, plugins, and settings will all be replaced on the destination site:

8. If you agree, click Import Everything.
9. Click the “Import and overwrite” button to start the import process:

10. You can now monitor the import progress or safely navigate away from the import screen. We’ll send you a notification when the import has been completed.

Depending on the size of the site you’re importing, the import process can take a few minutes to a few hours. If the import has not been completed in six hours, or you see errors during the import process, our Happiness Engineers are here to help!

After the Import

When the import completes, review the site to make sure it looks like what you expect.

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.