Moving to a new webhost without losing any of your blog content is a challenge for many. Such migration is a must if you are moving from a wordpress.com blog to a self hosted blog. It is very important to move all the text content in the form of article, comments and multimedia (images/video). There are a number of easy ways that wordpress supports to migrate all your data into a new blog. This article is aimed at exploring various options to accomplish the same.
The simplest and easiest way is to use the export and import options provided through wordpress admin dashboard. There exists an excellent article about using that feature is provided on WordPress Documentation. You can move with ease from various blogging solutions like Blogspot, Joomla, LiveJournal, TypePad as well as WordPress with the help of that article. I am going to deal about the more complex way of migrating from WordPress blog on one web host to another. The below mentioned steps are advisable only if you cannot migrate with simpler ways of migration as mentioned in the link provided above. I had to get into this mode because WXR – WordPress Extended RSS method resulted in some kind of error while moving to a new host. 
Since that WXR file for my blog on previous host was about 8MB, it was failing due to file size limitation I suppose.
Before starting with these steps, ensure you have set up wordpress on your new webhost and you are able to login to wordpress admin dashboard. The assumption here is that you are retaining the domain name and the permalink structure from your old blog on to new one. Moving the blog via database involves a two step process, backing up the database and then restoring from the backed up database.
The steps to back up a blog’s mysql database are listed here : Backing up your Database. Only suggestion that I have is to choose GZip compression to download the backup of a database in the last step as mentioned in that article. Most of the webhosts do support GZip feature for MySQL via PhpMyAdmin. Ensure you have the downloaded file available on your desktop before proceeding with next step.
With that you have only backed up the database having articles, comments and any plugin customization option. Remember the most important thing you need to understand is that you haven’t backed up the images that you uploaded to be included in your blog posts. For that you need to take a backup of wp-content folder for ‘plugins’, ‘themes’ and ‘uploads’. Move these files to appropriate folders on your new web host. That completes migration of your uploaded image files, themes and plugins.
In order to restore the database from back up on to your new blog, follow this article titled ‘Restoring your database from backup‘. Continue these steps on your new host. This populates all the blog content on your new host. Go to new wordpress blog admin dashboard and enable the plugins. In the dashboard, go to setting page and ensure you have the right path under “miscellaneous” for upload files. Once that is done, feel free to write a test post with image content to ensure that things are working fine. Isn’t that simple? It may sound too technical for not so comfortable folks, never mind, it is really simple! I was able to set up everything from scratch on my new web host in less than 30 minutes and I am sure you can do it much faster!
sibin says
Thanks ,Nice Tutorial for Migration
karthick r says
Hi,
I have created a word press account. I imported all my blogger content to wp. everything got imported [including the comments, links etc] but there were formatting issues. the font, font colour at some places were different. have u faced such issues?
also, there were a lot of ‘>>’, ‘<<' characters in the post. i had to remove it manually.
is there a way to export the blog contents to a flat file.
thanks.
Anshul Dixit says
Thanks for the article Mohan. Its useful for newbies like me. 🙂
Sangitha says
Hi, Mohan!
Learned a lot from your blog. I have a question on blogs and templates. I want to do more with the set up of my blog and find myself limited by my current service. WordPress seems to offer more flexibility. Or should I just move directly to a personal website instead of another move in a year? What do you think?
Thanks,
Sangitha
Shanmuharajan says
thanks
Mohan says
You’r most welcome!
Shanmuharajan says
Mohan, Iam using Blogspot, Do you know how to migrate to new hosting service without loosing any of my post? Or is it advisable to buy a custom domain. Can you pls advice on this
Mohan says
Yes, it should be easy too. You can find more details on moving from blogger to wordpress in the link given above in the first para. When you migrate from blogspot to wordpress, obviously, your URL will change. And, if you are planning to write and maintain your blog for a long, go for custom domain. Else be happy with blogspot or wordpress.
Gyanban says
Mohan – exporting wordpress into an xml file and then importing to an wordpress domain is probably easy…
but what i am trying to do is to integrate my jasaala.wordpress.com posts with my blogger domain gyanban.com – but it is not working.!
any ideas?
Mohan says
It should be fairly easy. I haven’t tried that option yet. Let me revert back to you on this.
Tavish says
Thats a really helpful article buddy… will need it in the future… now I know where to refer when I get a problem 🙂
Mohan says
Hehehe.. anytime!
lostworld says
nanage yenu artha aagilla saar 🙂 can tell u are upto something complicated!
Mohan says
Don’t worry maadkolli 😉
It is no rocket science and you don’t need to panic as long as you stay happy with your stuff on blogger. The moment you think you need more, reach out to me… I’m always here to help 😀
Swaram says
When I want my own domain, I know whom I need to reach out too 😛
Mohan says
My pleasure madam.
Deepa says
wow!! you are blogging regularly inspite of an hectic time u might be having or not having at work.. kudos for the spirit..
Mohan says
Well, the work is a part of life… so is my blog! thanks for dropping by 🙂
Lavi says
Hi Mr.Mohan,
Its a very interesting topic.. If I had know this earlier, I would have never gone to Weebly… Tried to shift all my old blog’s contents to wordpress as a trial and its working out really well.. Great.. Thanks for such a useful post.. For sure weebly will not allow me to do.. And yeah, Weebly does help me to present lots of my opinion. so I may not shift now.. Neeways…thanks for such an interesting post..
Mohan says
Hi Lavanya, I haven’t tried out weebly. It could be due to the fact that I have been in love with wordpress all the way! Glad this post was useful to you.
Hemanth says
Hi Mohan,
I really liked the content of the post. Very useful. Even the previous one was good, the review on various hosting solutions. Ok, to the point. This covers, the part of migrating from one hosted solution to another. What about moving from wordpress.com to your own domain/host? Would it be similar or is that a little tricky? I do not have much content, it would probably be around 5mb including the images and content. All in all 30 odd posts. The reason I want to migrate is because, of the freedom it offers to do the customization. Although, I love wordpress…I dearly miss the css customization that blogspot offers.
Regards,
Hemanth.
Mohan says
Hi Hemanth, welcome! thanks for your kind words. For migrating from wordpress.com site to a self hosted blog is even much easier with WXR file, see the link in the second para for more info on that. Given that you have very little content as of now, it would be a cake walk 🙂
As you have rightly pointed out, self hosted wordpress gives you a number of customization options to experiment with.
Praveen says
This is really helpful for may bloggers who want to migrate to a different host. thanks mohan 😉
Mohan says
Glad you liked it 🙂 Thanks!
Magali Vaz says
Wow! This is like Greek & Latin to me, though I’m sure it’s helpful to many.
Mohan says
Hehehe… you will learn about it over a period of time. You can always refer back when you plan to switch over to WordPress 🙂
Srinath says
why not write a python script which does it all 😀
Mohan says
Srinath, we do this probably once in 3 years and not very often. Also, the settings may differ over a period of time. For a work that needs less than 30 mintues, I don’t see much benefit in writing some code 😉
Srinath says
How many bloggers are there in this world? Assume 100 million. Assume you migrate 10 times. 100 million times 10 times half hour is a lot of time 😉
Mohan says
Sounds like a plan. Let me see if I can do something on those lines 🙂