**Note: Apparently, I had written this almost two months ago and then gotten distracted before hitting POST. Ooops. That whole “where’s my website????” incident is now a blur of a memory.**
This is a follow-up to my post from last week about the experience of trying to move my WP.com site over to a WP.org version so I can add some e-comm capabilities other than just a straight storefront.
Spoiler alert: life did not come to an end as I know it after all. Stressful week AF, yes, but I figured out how to export in pieces and want to share that for those who may someday avoid go through this same heart pounding thing:
After my fourth or fifth night of around 4 hours of sleep, I woke up with an idea. I revisited the admin page of my WP.com and took another look at the Export options. Although I found the instructions for this NO WHERE, I am officially putting them here right now. So, let me show you how to do this:
1. In WP Admin > Tools > Export. Choose the free option and click Start Export. This is how the next screen opened up with the box already checked for All content. Despite what it says there, unless your current blog has only two total pages, around 40 posts with tiny clipart and that’s about it, “All” won’t cut it. If you actually want all of your site to back up and export, you need to do it in pieces.
2. Start with your Posts by clicking that. If you post regularly, there’s a lot of stuff like on mine, so focus on the start and end date parameters. My dog merch site went back to December 2012. When I had erroneously believed “All” would cut it, I discovered it copied over only two pages, one of which was the first 45 posts from the blog that were from December 2012 through August 2014 (yet there are actually 342 posts, 23 pages, a lot of media and thus why I freaked). When I went back in to try to export again and clicked Posts, the option came up to select by date range, which is what I used to then successfully export in pieces. Do that. you can also change default “All” to specific options, like just what was published instead of the drafts.
3. When you make your selection and then click Export, the next screen says it is being processed and a download link gets sent to your email. Open the email, click the link and download the export file to a (highly suggested) location you’ve created for these exports/backups (See below). Don’t be lazy and drop it randomly on your desktop. If you’re doing this in pieces due to volume like I was, you should make a special folder for it. I wound up with 11 zips and made folders as explained in red in the screen shot. When you unzip it, I highly recommend changing the name of the file immediately to whatever parameter you used, i.e.: MEDIA2019. Makes it easier to figure out since all the downloaded zips looked alike and there’s no telling what’s in it if you don’t label it yourself.
4. If you click once on your .XML file to see the preview, you’ll see that WP thoughtfully included instructions to go forward, but I’ll still keep walking ya’ll through it. At this point, go into your WP.org version site. WP Admin > Tools > Import. If the original site was something other than WordPress, choose that. If it was WordPress, select WordPress Run Importer toward the bottom. Upload each of the .XML files one at a time. When finished uploading, I personally went to the appropriate WP.org section (my pages, posts, media) to double check that I was happy the file got everything imported because if not, I’d go back and shrink the parameters of the export and re-export until I was happy everything was included – this is especially important if you are a heavy poster. Just double check.
Repeat Steps 2 through 4 for each export section you do. FYI, there is no penalty for importing something twice because you will simply get a message when the import is completed that “Suchandsuch.jpg already exists” as appropriate. Better too many than leaving something out.
There you go. I’ve been on WP.com with CaffeinatedMusic since 2008. As entrenched as some of my posts are in Google standings, there is no way I could see ever moving it to self-hosting elsewhere. But in my dog art studio’s case, its purpose as a blog was very minor as most of my human contact for the page comes through Facebook. Everybody’s needs are different, so really think about what you want, what you need, and what, if anything, are you willing to sacrifice if it doesn’t go as smoothly as you’d hoped.
When I get the new platform finished, I’ll update more on the where, what and how for those who are thinking about doing the same thing.
A college class in Entrepreneurship basics required starting an e-comm venture from scratch. I had already begun the process, but that wasn’t acceptable; I needed to do a comparison and had to at least start the second option from scratch. Fair enough. What was the result? Interesting. Here’s the gist of my presentation (I won’t bore you with the slideshow version).
