If you started your blog on a free site, such as Weebly, you might want to move it to WordPress, along with your own hosting. This can provide many benefits, including your own domain name, better branding, SEO benefits and much more. WordPress is the top content management system and allows you to do quite a bit more than Weebly does. Here’s a step-by-step plan for moving your site.
How to Move from Weebly to WordPress
Step #1 – Setup WordPress
Before you do anything else, you need to get a domain name and hosting you can use for your new WordPress site. Once you’ve found the right hosting and domain name, set up WordPress using the one-click installation. We provide top choices for your hosting needs including many great WordPress hosts, such as ITX Design and BlueHost.
Setting up WordPress takes a little more than just installing the platform. You need to choose a theme, either paid or free, and set it up with all the things you need for your new site. Make sure you get your plugins set up and your theme fully customized to make the process easier when you finally to migrate your Weebly site.
Step #2 – Migrate Weebly Content
You can easily use the RSS import feature within WordPress to move your content from Weebly to WordPress. All you will need is your Weebly RSS feed URL, which should look something like this:
www.yourblog.com/1/feed or username.weebly.com/1/feed
The only time this won’t work is for Weebly sites set up without a blog section. If you don’t have a blog section, you won’t have an RSS feed, which makes the process a bit more time consuming. As long as your feed URL is working fine, you can set it up with the Google reader, which looks like this:
http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://www.yoursite.com/1/feed?n=500
The ?n=500 tells Google how many posts to show in the feed. You can decrease or increase this number depending on your needs. Put this URL into your Google reader and you will get an XML file you can save by right clicking and selecting “Save Page As”. This will download your entire ATOM feed, which leads you to the next step.
Step #3 – Convert from ATOM to RSS
There are many ways to convert an ATOM file to an RSS file, but the easiest is through your new hosting company. Just upload it through the FTP or file manager and use the conversion tool provided (Devtacular) to convert it. Make sure you save it as yoursite.xml to your computer once you’ve converted the file.
Step #4 – Import to WordPress
Now you need to import your RSS feed file to WordPress through the dashboard. Go to Tools and click on Import. This will allow you to select the RSS import option and upload your RSS file from your computer. Once the upload is complete, you will have every post from your Weebly blog on your new WordPress blog.
Step #5 – Moving Pages
Now that you have your posts moved to WordPress, you might want to move your pages. This is a little more difficult, but you can use a plugin, such as HTML Import 2 if you have a large number of pages. If you just have a few pages, it’s easiest to create new pages in WordPress and just copy and paste your content and images to the new pages.
That’s all it takes to move your Weebly site over to WordPress and you will gain many advantages from making the switch. Weebly works fine, at first, but WordPress is more powerful and provides many options you cannot get with Weebly. If you’re serious about the future of your blog, it’s time to move it over and the first step is choosing the best WordPress hosting you can find.
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