Wordpress is simply too good to refuse when you want to start a website for quick and professional operation. But you might want to migrate from other platforms where you have worked for long time such as blogger, tumblr and wordress.com service. This article provides detailed guidance on how to migrate your contents to hosted wordpress site from blogger, tumblr and wordpress.com service. Share it if you found it helpful.

Please note, all our guidance below solely focus on web contents but not considering other factors like search engine. If you have sufficient traffic on old site and would like to redirect all to your hosted domain, you might put an announcement or send out newsletters to people so they can get notified for the move.

Migration from Blogger to WordPress

The migration is pretty straight, the wordpress has provided us the tool to simplify the process. But before we start the moving, it's necessary to get a nice domain and wordpress hosting service. We highly recommend to check out this best wordpress hosting page for best selections. After hosting service is ready to go, get your domain configured via basic wordpress installation. You can do this manually or take advantage of auto installer like softaculous. The process could be done in few minutes since everything is automatic. Now we're going to start the move

1. Login to wordpress admin panel, click "Tools" then click "Import". Here's a list of options, click "Blogger" which is on top of the list.
2. It requires us to get the plugin "blogger-importer" installed. Click the button to proceed.
3. Click "Authorize" to allow wordpress access to your google account.
4. Once authorized, you will get a list of your Blogger Blogs. Select the blog you wish to import and the process takes just few seconds.

Now, all you blogger contents are moved over. If you heavily consider search engine friendly. You might take a look at this article from Amit Agarwal. Here's a video show about the entire process

Migration From Tumblr to WordPress

To begin, refer to wordress dashboard, then click "Tools" then "Import" and confirm the "Tumblr Importer" plugin installation. You will be asked to enter Tumblr account login email & password. Fill out then click "Connect" to proceed.

The importer will grab over everything automatically and we can watch the entire progress via frequent refresh. Once the process done, you will get email notification.

Note: there're people who have applied custom domain name for their tumblr blogs. For this case, we need to disable this feature first via tumblr dashboard > Settings > un-check the "Use a Custom Domain".

Migration from WordPress.com

Importing from wordpress.com is almost the same as above. Because it's managed by wordpress, we get much better experience. Just go ahead to try out and you'll be surprised about the speedy procedure.

No matter if you have imported from which service. You never want to loose connection to your visitors. Thus we highly suggest you put a notice on your old blogs and guide them to check your hosted site. Under some circumstance, you may also send out newsletter to followers so they can get notifed in time.

Why do the migration?

Simply because we need more control over the site and do further customization. No matter which free service we use, there&'re various limitation in using it. But things are different when we host the website from our own hosting space. There we have full access to each website files and backend database. It's also a MUST when we need do business on website. We can't put everything at a free service for any reason.

It's absolutely nice journey to work with wordpress for it's super friendly and powerful design. But some day you found your wordpress site needs better support and have to move to new server space, you might be not sure to begin with. This article guides you step by step on how to migrate a wordpress site to new space for different situations. You should be able to handle any type wordpress site migration by following our guidance.

Wordpress migration without domain change

This should be the most popular migration where we just need to move existing site to new server space. Following are full steps of the process. Here we take cpanel account for example, other control panel softwares provide similar features.

1. Login to your cpanel center and navigate to your wordpress installation directory. If its your primary site, it's normally located under "Public_html" which is the root directory.

2. Select all files/folders on top navigation bar and right click anywhere on file list then select "Compress". By default it will take the first folder name for the compressed file. You can leave it as it is or just give it a good name you can easily remember. Once compression done, right click on the file name and choose download to save it on your computer drive.

3. Now, let's go ahead to backup your wordpress database. Go back to cpanel home and navigate to "Database" section then choose "phpMyAdmin". Now you're redirected to phpmyadmin panel. Click on the database which your wordpress site is using. You probably not sure which database it is if there're multiple ones, especially when you installed the wordpress site via auto installers like softaculous. For this case, just go back to your file wordpress installation directory and open the file "wp-config.php", there's a line "DB_NAME", your database name is placed there.

4. Select all tables then choose "Export" from the dropdown list in the bottom page. It will give you two options, quick and custom. Leave it as default and click "Go" button. It will prompt up a window for downloading. That's your database file, click save to save it on your computer.

Now, you have get full backup of your wordpress website files and mysql database. We need to put it online from your new server space. So here're detailed steps

1. Upload the compressed file to your new server space via new ftp credentials(be sure to upload to the exact directory where you would like to put up the wordpress site). Navigate to file manager and locate the file we just uploaded, then right click on the file and choose "Extract". It will ask where you like to extract all files to. By default it will unzip to current directory, if you would like to put under other directories, just specify the path then press "Extract File(s)" to proceed.

2. Now, navigate to control panel "Database" section and click the "MySQL Databases" icon. Under create new database section, fill out your desired database name to create a new database. Scroll down to create a user/password then assign it to your database.

3. Go back to control panel Database section and click "phpMyAdmin", Click the database we just created. Click the "Import" icon from top navigation bar and it will bring us to import wizard. On the new page, click "browse" to choose the database backup file we just saved then click "Go" to have all data uploaded. Wait some time for the wizard to complete.(Note: if your have a large size database, you can upload the file to file manager directory then contact hosting support to import because it will be timed out easily on customer end)

Now you have restored everything to new server space. Bypass DNS as we suggested from previous article and test if everything working properly. If yes, find a good time to change over DNS servers. If not, fix everything before you make the change.

UPDATE: we can use following sql queries to replace everything in short time other than do it manually.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace( post_content, 'old.com','new.com');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = replace(comment_content, 'old.com', 'new.com');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url = replace(comment_author_url, 'old.com', 'new.com');
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace( guid, 'old.com','new.com');

Wordpress migration with domain change

To many people, website means business. If our site is alreayd crawled by search engines with good traffic, of course we want to drive the traffic to new site. It's big pain to let search bots to crawl our new domain from scratch. For this purpose, we need to configure 301 redirects from all old urls to new site. In .htaccess file, we need to change to following:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^www.old.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.new.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

If our server is windows based, we need to add following to wp-blog-header.php from website root(after the first <?php sign)

if (strtolower($_SERVER[‘SERVER_NAME’])!='newsite.com')
{
$URIRedirect=$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’];
if(strtolower($URIRedirect)=="/index.php")
{
$URIRedirect="/";
}
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location:http://newsite.com'.$URIRedirect);
exit();
}

Now, your old site URLs will be redirected to new URLs and business will keep alive!