Interested in migrating your site to WordPress.com?
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.
If you wish to import an entire WordPress site, including plugins, themes, and users, the Migrate Guru plugin can help you achieve that. Follow the steps in this guide to import an exact copy of your website to WordPress.com.
In this guide
To follow the steps in this guide, you will need:
- Your destination site: a WordPress.com website with our Creator or Entrepreneur plan.
- Your source site: a WordPress site with any other hosting provider (referred to as a self-hosted or WordPress.org site) or a WordPress.com staging site.
- All incompatible plugins deactivated on the source site.
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By migrating a site using this method, the entire contents of the WordPress.com site will be erased and replaced with the site that you import.
In this first step, you will install the Migrate Guru plugin on your WordPress.com site and generate a key that you’ll use to begin the migration in the next step. Follow these instructions to install the plugin and generate the key:
- Log into WordPress.com.
- Visit the destination site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Plugins → Add New Plugin.
- Search for “Migrate Guru” and locate the Migrate Guru plugin in the results.
- Install and activate the plugin on your site.
- Once the plugin is active, click the new “Migrate Guru” menu option at the bottom of your dashboard:
- At the bottom of the Migrate Guru settings screen, click the “Copy Key” button to copy the migration key for your site:
In this step, you will install the same 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 source site.
- Install and activate the Migrate Guru plugin.
- In your source site’s WP-Admin dashboard, click “Migrate Guru” to visit the plugin’s settings page.
- Add an 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 migration.
- Wait for the migration to complete. This can take a while, even on small sites.
Once the migration finishes, review your new WordPress.com site. Ensure you can access tools and plugins in your dashboard and that your new site has the features and functionality you need from the source site.
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 anything isn’t working as expected, please send us a message to let us know that you have just completed a migration using the Migrate Guru plugin. We will look over your site to make sure the migration went smoothly.
