Export your website’s content

Export your site’s content to transfer it to another WordPress site or platform. In this guide, you will learn how to export your site’s posts, pages, and comments.

Before creating your export file, complete these steps to make the process faster and more reliable:

1. Change your site to public visibility so your images can transfer to the new site. You can change this back to private after the transfer is complete.
2. Clean up your site to create a smaller, faster export file that contains only the content you want by:
   1. Deleting unwanted draft pages and posts.
   2. Removing spam and pending comments.
   3. Deactivating unused plugins.

Your export file will include your posts, pages, and comments but will not include your theme design, customizations, or plugins. To export your entire site, including design elements, use a migration plugin.

To create an export file of your WordPress.com site’s content, follow these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Tools → Export.

3. Choose “All content” to export everything, or select specific types of content.
4. Click the “Download Export File” button.

5. Wait while your export file is created. This usually takes 1-2 minutes for most sites. The file will download to your computer automatically when ready.
6. You’ll get a file that contains all the content you selected. This includes your posts, pages, comments, and links to your images.

If your export is on the larger side (approximately more than 1000 pages or posts), you will receive an email with a single .zip file containing multiple XML files. When importing into another site, import each of the .xml files individually.

Your content is saved as an XML file (or an WXR file), which is a standard file format that can be read by WordPress and many other website platforms. This file contains your posts, pages, comments, categories, and tags, plus links to your media files (not the actual files).

Don’t delete or make your original site private yet. Your new site needs to access it to copy your images, which can take several hours for sites with many photos. To confirm all your images transferred successfully, compare the number of items in your media library on both your old and new sites. They should match.

Your export file doesn’t actually contain your media library (like photos, videos, audio, etc.). Instead, it contains instructions that tell your new site where to find and copy these files from your original site. This is why you need to keep your original site public and accessible – your new site uses these instructions to find and copy your images during the import.

You can also download all of your site’s media by exporting your media library.

After exporting your site’s content, you can:

• Import to another WordPress.com site
• Import to a self-hosted WordPress site
• Import to other platforms that accept XML files

If you’re moving to a self-hosted WordPress site, install the free Jetpack plugin first to maintain Jetpack functionality on the new site.

If you’re moving away from WordPress.com to another host and no longer plan to use your WordPress.com website, you may wish to:

• Transfer your domain to another registrar.
• Cancel your WordPress.com subscriptions.
• Divert your WordPress.com site address (such as yourgroovysite.wordpress.com) to your new site’s domain.
• Migrate your subscribers by installing the free Jetpack plugin and using the Subscriber Migration Tool.

WordPress.com already creates automatic backups of your site and stores them safely. If something goes wrong with our servers, we can restore your site from these backups.

The export file only includes your written content and references to your images. It doesn’t include your theme, any design customizations, plugins, or the actual image files themselves. For a complete backup solution, sites with plugin-enabled plans can restore from a backup at any time.

If you want to manually back up your content using the export method, import the XML file into another WordPress site after exporting. This creates a content backup you can access independently.

If your export fails, it’s usually because your site has too much content to process at once. Here’s how to fix this:

1. Deactivate any plugins on your site (which are not included in the export file anyway.)
2. Delete any spam or pending comments.
3. Delete any pages or posts you don’t want to export.
4. Export smaller portions of your content at a time by choosing specific dates, authors, or categories instead of trying to export everything at once.