Website Kickoff Part 2 – Transferring Sites

This is the second installment of how I started using modularlessons.com. Part 1 dealt with the domain purchase as well choosing web-hosting options. Today, I will briefly talk about the next important part of this process- The content!

More importantly content i’ve already created. So I had modularlessons.com active and ready to go, but with no content. I had content.. but it was already posted on itknorg.wordpress.com. In my head, I had a few options. First option was to start from scratch and start this site with new content. Second option was to move the content but in a more tedious way…by typing all of the individually. I really didn’t like either option. I thought the content I already had was relatable to this site so I didn’t want that work to go to waste. I also didn’t want to spend time typing (or copy/pasting :] ) content all over again. I wanted to keep that timestamp of when I started this blog site. So I had to search for another option

Transferring the Content

Luckily, there was a third option. Or a better efficient of option 2. Point is, I was going to leverage WordPress feature to export my pages and import them into modularlessons.com. It was quite simple actually.

  1. In the WordPress admin page go to Tools > Export
  2. Hit the Drop down in the Export your Content option
  3. You can decide to export all, or a specific range of content based on your parameters
  4. You will get a .zip file that contains .xml file
  5. Go to the site admin page you want to move the content to
  6. Go to Tools > Import
  7. Choose WordPress (or whatever technology you used for these posts)
  8. Hit the choose button and browse for that .xml file

Keep in mind that WordPress can only import a .xml file with the size of 256KB. If it is larger than that, it will still use the file, but ignore data after that threshold. I realized this when my first file was slightly bigger. It resulted in some blog posts not coming through. No worries though, you can make more than one .xml file to target posts, pages, etc. and import them as well.

Sidenote

I also wanted to mention of an additional option in the beginning of this. That was to keep my itknorg.wordpress.com site and just change the domain name. However, I didn’t really like this option. See, itkorg.wordpress.com is actually hosted by wordpress.com. And it’s similar experience to if Bluehost (now my hosting provider) as far as manipulation of the site… however, it’s really restricted. Basically, it was really great for beginners and people that want to do it for fun, but when it came down to anything else (marketing, domain names, plugins, etc.) it required a paywall. It looked too restrictive out of the box. I also haven’t heard of people’s opinion when it came to having WordPress hosting their site. That was when I searched on how other people go about handling their site.

Takeaway

So takeaway here? I would say it is to learn and adapt. Be willing to do research on how to go about something, but always be on the lookout on how to do other ways and how to transition. Life, as well as technology, are always evolving and staying in the same setup during these changes can either make or break you. You have to stay up-to-date, compare the pros/cons, and make a good conscious for yourself. Every option i mentioned here isn’t bad. They get the job done, but it’s up to you on what works.

Resources

Where I learned the importing: https://www.greengeeks.com/tutorials/article/how-to-transfer-your-wordpress-content-from-one-blog-to-another/