How to Move Your Blog From Weebly to WordPress
Services such as Weebly are great when you want to go from not having a website to having a good-looking one in a matter of minutes. Weebly doesn’t burden you with worries such as hosting, domain names, or even fees – it simply lets you work on your website without much fuss and with few hoops to jump through.
However, no service is perfect, and that just might be the reason you’re here. You’ve heard about WordPress and the many reasons for using it. You’re thinking about making a change and moving your blog from Weebly to WordPress, and you’re wondering how difficult it can be.
You’re in the right place. This article will explain it all, covering topics that include:
To be fair, there are plenty of reasons why choosing Weebly as your very first website builder makes perfect sense. It is, after all, one of the easiest and most intuitive website builders you can use. If you want to customize its looks, it will give you templates. If you want apps, the App Center will be there to provide them. If you need support – they will be there, too.
But you know those templates? WordPress has themes, and many more of them, too. It might indeed be hard to find really good ones for free. If you find a premium theme designer studio you like, you can find a premium blog WordPress theme that’s everything you ever imagined and that comes with support.
The apps? There is no possible way they could compete with WordPress plugins. The plugins are, along with the themes, one of the best aspects of using WordPress. Whatever you want to do with your blog, there’s an app that will help you. A lot of them, maybe even the majority, are either free or freemium, so you can keep your expenses in check.
As for the support, WordPress doesn’t offer any. But WordPress is in the center of a sprawling community that likes to develop plugins, design themes, and – share knowledge. You’d be hard-pressed to find a topic about WordPress that’s not covered online.
So why migrate a blog from Weebly to WordPress? Usually, the answer is because Weebly has become too limiting. Sure, WordPress might be more demanding technically, but the benefit from engaging in it is clear.
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When your mind’s made up about the switch, the first thing you should do is make sure that your current blog, the one at Weebly, has somewhere to migrate. This means that there should be a WordPress website waiting to take in all the content from your blog.
The things you should do in this part of the process include:
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Find a website host. Make sure you check their reputation as well as their offering. Plan a bit when choosing a package – leave your blog some room to grow.
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Install a WordPress website. You can do it manually or use your host’s 2-minute installation option if it offers it. What matters is that you end up with a working website.
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Get a domain name. If you haven’t already got one through Weebly, get a domain name. If you have it, ask your host to set up a temporary domain you’ll use for the transition.
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Get a WordPress theme. This is something you can do later, but at the very least browse some themes and learn how to install them.
You’ll have plenty of time, later on, to find and install plugins, unless you’ll be using them to perform the transition. Which brings us to the reason you’re here.
Weebly doesn’t make it easy to move posts and pages from your Weebly blog to your new WordPress blog. The closest it has to an export option is the option to create a .zip archive of your blog. It will save your pages as HTML files, and you’ll also be able to find the images you uploaded somewhere in there. You won’t be able to find your posts, however, as Weebly doesn’t let you archive them at the moment.
It’s for this reason and because no tool you can use to somewhat automate the process will guarantee it works well 100% of the time that it might be best to manually switch your blog from Weebly to WordPress. If you don’t have too many pages and posts, building pages and copying content a piece at a time might be the most reasonable thing to do. If you really want to automate it, here’s what you can do.
Migrating Pages
For the pages, go to Weebly’s website editor, and navigate to Settings > General. Scroll down until you see the Archive option. Enter your email address, and Weebly will send a website archive, the one we mentioned before, to the email address you provided.
If you don’t receive an email, don’t worry – repeat the process and you’ll get a download link right beneath the email field in the Weebly backend.
When you get the archive, go to your WordPress website and install the HTML Import 2 plugin. You can find it by going to Plugins > Add New and searching for it. If it doesn’t appear in the results, download it from WordPress.org and upload it to your website.
It’s an old plugin that hasn’t been updated for some time, but it might get the job done. Just remember that you should always be careful when using unsupported plugins.
You can access its settings by going to Setting > HTML Import. You can set anything from the status of the pages you plan to import to categories and custom fields you’d like to use. At the very least, you should choose the “Select content by” option before you proceed to import the file.
Go to Tool > Import and press the “Run Importer” text for the HTML importer. Choose the directory with files or a single file and import it.
You should always check the results to make sure that everything landed well. You may have to do some editing to make sure the pages look the way you want them to, but at the very least their contents should be all there.
Migrating Posts
Weebly automatically sets up an RSS feed for your posts. Unfortunately, you’ll find the default RSS importer that comes with WordPress a bit lacking when it comes to transferring Weebly’s Atom feed to your WordPress website.
However, if you install the Import any XML or CSV File to WordPress – also known as WP All Import – plugin, you won’t have to worry a single bit. After installing it, navigate to the All Import option in the dashboard menu and let the wizard take you through the whole import process. By the end of it, you might find yourself with perfectly imported posts, images and all.
If visuals are missing, you might either need to use the paid version of the plugin or find an alternative way of adding them. The images you used for your posts will be in your archive file, so you’ll know where to look for them if you decide to add them manually.
You can also use another plugin, Auto Upload Images, to add images that are missing from your posts. Keep in mind, however, that the plugin isn’t flawless, and that it’s been years since it was last updated. Much like HTML Importer 2, you should be very careful when using it, and you should always double and even triple-check the results.
After you’ve finished with the migration process, your next actions should aim to ensure that your new content looks well, that you suffer as little as possible SEO-wise from the change, and that you’re getting the things you need from WordPress.
Here are the things you should do:
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Sort out the domain. If you’re using a new one, you’ll need to set up redirects. If you’re using the one you registered with Weebly, follow their guide for unlocking domains.
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Sort out the domain. If you’re using a new one, you’ll need to set up redirects. If you’re using the one you registered with Weebly, follow their guide for unlocking domains.
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Check whether all content made it over. If something is missing – likely, it will be media – add it manually if you’ve already tried adding it with a plugin.
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Make sure everything looks good. Now’s the time for cosmetics – customize the theme and make sure your blog posts look every bit as good as they did before.
With that, your migration is finally done. You can enjoy your new WordPress blog and never look back.
Let’s Wrap It Up
Sooner or later, every other content management system or website builder starts feeling small and feature-poor when compared with WordPress. This is a common reason why someone would consider migrating a blog from Weebly to WordPress.
Still, that step between consideration and the actual migration is a big one – moving a big blog from Weebly to WordPress can be an awful lot of work, especially if you’re thinking about doing it manually. If not, remember that plugins will help, but that nothing beats a migration service that takes care of everything for you.
