Before you simply “Export”
your self hosted WordPress installation and “Import” into your new or existing WordPress.com site [Export and Import are found in the "Tools" menu in the dashboard] – there are some steps to moving or merging a self-hosted WordPress.org website with a hosted blog on WordPress.com you need to take to align the two before merging or moving.
MATCH PERMALINKS
- Since you will be moving your site to WordPress.com, you must conform to their permalinks. GO to the permalinks setting on your hosted WordPress website and set them to “Day and name”… i.e. http://www.yourwebsiteurl.com/year/month/day/post-slug/ – the Day and name permalinks setting will setup your links to reflect how posts’ URL appear on WordPress.com.
POST & LINK CATEGORIES
- You will need to align and verify that you don’t have any old Categories you don’t need, clean these up.
ALIGN & CLEAN-UP TAGS
- Again just do some cleanup of old tags that aren’t used then compare both sites tags to see if you can merge any with upper and lower case examples.
IMPORT LINKS
- Links do not transfer with the import export feature, these must be moved manually or via MySQL
- Use the instructions from this link to import your old WordPress website’s links
CHANGE DNS RECORDS
Go to your website domain registrar and change the DNS record to point to WordPress.com servers. Instructions are here provided by WordPress.com
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