Documentation

Migrating and Importing Content

Contents

Overview #

It’s important to start populating your site with real content as soon as possible.

For Small Migrations (less than 15MB)

We make it easy for you to import your blog content from a variety of other blogging platforms, including Blogger, Israblog, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Typepad, Posterous, Splinder, and Yahoo! 360. Simply log into your WordPress.com blog dashboard, then go to Tools -> Import, choose your previous platform and follow the instructions. The WordPress.com support site has more detailed instructions, or feel free to reach out with any questions.

For Large Migrations

In most cases, the most straightforward approach to migrating your content is to first get it into WordPress’s native import/export format: WXR. Once you have all of your content available in WXR format, WordPress can import that file.

A few notes on imports:

  • One of the most important steps in the migration process is adding users to the site before the import, so any existing articles and content can be correctly mapped at time of import. Please provide the VIP team a definitive list of the username mapping as soon as possible.
  • We will work directly with you to make sure that nothing malicious or spammy slips in through old comments, and to make sure WordPress.com’s security filter does not strip any of your in-post Javascript, media, embeds, or iframe tags.
  • We’ll either side-load all of your images over, or grab a copy of your media archive and after copying them to our data centers, massage the information in the export files before importing them.
  • WordPress.com has automatic URL transformation for the popular platforms. We’ll examine your permalink structure, and share with you the solutions our other customers have done, or advise you on what is the best solution in your unique case.

As each import is a little different, lead time is desired. The operation depends on the size and nature of your content. It’s a great idea to do an import early on in the migration process. This makes sure data import will not slow down the site transfer and allows you to theme with real data.

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Migration Services #

Migrating content from WordPress-to-WordPress is included in your per-site setup fee. We also provide content migration services, and can help you migrate from any other content management system—those projects are priced on scope, and typically range $15k-$50k. Get in touch via the contact form in your VIP Dashboard if you are interested.