My blog on WordPress.com is up for renewal shortly. I could have just spunked £60 for another two years and that would be it but my online setup on their Personal plan comes with quite a lot of restrictions. You can’t add any plugins, you can’t upload video and there are space quotas for media I was beginning to fill up too so I’ve decided to migrate to my own fully managed site.
To obtain that functionality online would mean an upgrade to their Business plan @ £384!!!!
I’ve done quite a lot of work with WordPress and Woocommerce with my job recently so I was confident in doing it but those damn restrictions made it a right faff.
In an ideal world you simply install a migration plugin on the old and new site and it will effectively manage the copy for you but because my wordpress.com site plan wouldn’t allow me to install any plugins, my only option was to export and import manually. Not as easy as you think.
WordPress, despite being one of the world’s most popular web platforms, isn’t very good at managing migrations of any size through it’s standard import function. Because of the time it takes to copy images, for example, the import page kept timing out so I had to break my post imports down into 6 month chunks and repeating the import until the script completed and all files and posts were copied. Even then there were further nuances around how it created and referenced my images in posts, leaving some visible some not.
Then there was setting up a method to contact site subscribers which I’ve achieved by installing another plugin that manages subscriptions and post notifications. Mailpoet if you are interested. The Free plan is ideal.
The migrations and setup are complete now. I’m sure there are still a few image issues in some posts but the functionality, look and feel of the site is in place and working now, I think. If you spot anything, please let me know.
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Adios
PS If you have a wordpress blog (or woocommerce site) and need any help with migration or setup, just reach out