It is a common practice that new bloggers or small business owners start their first website or blog by using free site builder tools and free hosted blogs. Blogger, Weebly and Wix are few examples of this. The basic purpose of creating a website on these free services is to get online presence without spending a penny to invest the amount in the main business. Bloggers and website owners later, realize that these free blogs and websites have very limited features and to attract the customers or blog readers, these platforms are not good enough.
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After they start getting some advantage out of their free blogs or websites, they realize that a professional and good looking website can increase their revenue and sale many times with just a little investment. At that time they wanted to create a professional website on WordPress or Joomla but what to do about the work done and time spent on Weebly or blogger? If they create their WordPress website from scratch they don’t only have to invest money, but the old work went useless which is providing some business.
At this stage, they wish to migrate their free blog/website from blogger or Weebly to WordPress. Though it is a simple task but many people don’t have any idea about how they can transfer their existing Weebly blog to WordPress.
Basically, there are two different methods to migrate the website from Weebly to WordPress.
Method 1: Migrate Blog From Weebly To WordPress Manually
Before you start migrating your blog, manually or automatically (method 2), you have to purchase your own hosting account and domain (if you don’t have a custom domain name for your Weebly blog). Then you need to install the WordPress setup on your new domain name.
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If you want to manually migrate your blog/website from Weebly to WordPress, then it is not a big deal. Anyone who is familiar with the WordPress interface can easily migrate the site. In a manual migration, you have to create all the pages and posts manually just like you created on Weebly.
You have to copy the content and paste it into your new website. For images, you need to download each image from Weebly blog and upload those images to WordPress blog in specific posts and pages. It is preferred to create older posts first on your new blog. It will help you to keep the internal link building between different pages and posts.
Apart from the main content, you also need to transfer the post tags, keywords and meta tags properly for each page and post. This will help to main the SEO score of your blog.
Also, don’t forget to redirect your Weebly posts and pages to the new URLs on WordPress blog. A 301 redirect will help you and it will keep redirecting your current website’s traffic to your new website.
But remember, manual migration is good only for the small blogs and websites which has less than about 30 to 35 pages and posts. If the website is big and it has more posts and pages then it will be very time-consuming and difficult to manually migrate your website from Weebly to WordPress.
Method 2: Migrate Blog From Weebly To WordPress Automatically
To transfer your website from Weebly to WordPress automatically you need to install few plugins to your WordPress installation. This automatic migration will be done in 4 different steps. But keep this in mind that if your website is too big to handle all the data, it is better to outsource the work to some professional freelancer or agency who can migrate your big website from Weebly to WordPress.
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Step 1: In the first step, you need to import all your Weebly blog posts from Weebly’s RSS feed. This RSS feed can be saved from the link https://www.yoursubdomain.weebly.com/1/feed
You have to save this file to your computer.
The feed you save from the Weebly RSS Feed will give you only blog posts. And this will be ATOM format so WordPress can’t import it as RSS. WP All Import 1 is a WordPress plugin that you will need to install on your WordPress website. This plugin will import the feed downloaded from Weebly blog.
Step 2: In the second step you need to import your Weebly blog’s pages to your new WordPress site. For this, you have to download the complete archive of your Weebly website. You can do this by going to editing options from your Weebly account. Then you need to go to settings and there you need an option to get the .zip archive of your website. You will be required to enter your email address and click on archive. Once you do this, you will get the download file link in your email address which you provide.
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On this page, give your email address and click on “Email Archive”.
Through this archive, you will get the HTML pages of your website. Now from here, you need to HTML Import Plugin 2 on your WordPress website to import all the pages of your Weebly website to your WordPress site. This plugin can also import your blog posts which you have done in step 1. But it is good to do both the steps separately.
Step 3: Now you have to import all the images from your Weebly to WordPress. Though your source code has links to your images hosted on Weebly server. But if you want to bring the images to your new sites, then you can use Import External Images 3. This plugin will read the source code and through image tags, it will find the images from your old website and then copy those images into your new website with proper linking to related posts and pages.
Step 4: Your website is ready and you can use it on WordPress platform. Now you have to redirect your current visitors to your new website so that you don’t lose any customers and visitors. For this, you can install the “Redirection” 4 plugin and redirect all your old posts and pages to new and relevant posts and pages.
You should also take care of your WordPress SEO to get better search engine rankings. You can read this detailed article about the WordPress SEO
Final Verdict: These are the very simple steps to migrate your website from Weebly to WordPress, but still there are chances that you can misconfigure the posts and pages. So it is better to outsource the work to some professional freelancer or agency.
If you have any questions regarding migrating your website from Weebly to WordPress, you can ask using the comment form below.
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