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 want to move content to WordPress.com from another WordPress site (either WordPress.com or a WordPress.org site), use the Import Content option. This option will import a copy of your pages, posts, and media to your new WordPress.com site, but not plugins, themes, or other design elements.
In this guide
You can move content (posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, and more) from one WordPress site to another using an XML file. To get the XML file, take the following steps for the platform you’re moving content from:
To obtain an XML content file from a WordPress site, take the following steps:
- In WP Admin, navigate to Tools → Export.
- Choose what to export here — you can select “all content” or specific content like Posts or Pages. You can further narrow down the content to export, for example, posts with a specific category or date range.
- Click the “Download Export File” button to save the file to your computer.
For more detail, visit the WordPress.org Export documentation.
Follow the steps below to import your XML content file from another WordPress site. This option will not delete or overwrite your site’s current content.
Select the appropriate tab for your admin interface style:
- Visit your WordPress.com site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Tools → Import.
- Select the “WordPress” option.
- On the “Let’s find your site“ screen, click the link labeled “pick your current platform from a list.”
- Select the “WordPress” option.
- On the “What do you want to do?” screen, choose the “Import content only” option.
- Drag your
.xmlor.zipexport file into the box, or select the link labeled “click to upload a file” in the box. - Wait a few moments for the file to finish uploading.
- You’ll be asked to reassign the authors of the imported items to an existing user on the new site. Choose your username here.
- If you’re importing content from a site with multiple admins, authors, or other users, you can streamline the import process by adding those user accounts to your new site before importing.
- Click the “Start Import” button.
The import process may take some time for large sites. You can safely navigate away from the import screen. We’ll send you a notification and an email when the import has been completed.
An XML import will move your images and other media. However, XML files contain no actual images or media files. They contain links to those files, which will be uploaded to the new site after you import the XML file by following the steps above.
For this reason, the site you exported from must remain publicly accessible until all images are present on your new site. You’ll know when all images have been copied over when the number of items in Media is the same on the new site as what you had on the original site.
After completing a content import, you might want to do any of the following:
- Review the pages and posts that have been imported to your new site.
- Select a new homepage at Settings → Reading.
- Choose a new theme for your site.
- Add a domain to your site.
- Upgrade to a paid plan for more benefits.
If you receive an error that an import file is too large when you try to upload it, it may be because of one of the following reasons:
- The XML content file is too large. Try exporting it in smaller sections, such as by date range or content type.
- When the import file is bigger than 15MB, try compressing it. The importer accepts ZIP files.
- You are uploading a tar.gz file. A tar.gz files contain directories with the database (SQL) and site files (media, plugins, themes, etc.) It requires a more advanced method for extracting the content into the correct places, using phpMyAdmin and SFTP. This is developer-level functionality. You have a few options:
- If you’re comfortable with developer-level access, you can use the tools to import your site.
- Use our step-by-step migration tool.
- You can hire a developer to migrate the site for you.
