Sometimes, albeit rarely, I will need to move all my posts from one WordPress blog to another one.  This is a daunting task, but it does not need to be.

WordPress and .htaccess actually make this very easy!  In three easy steps, you can have all of your WordPress content moved from your original blog location to your new one.

Side Note: This blog post assumes you have set up your new website and installed WordPress (2.9.1 or better) there already.  If you need to, upgrade your WordPress installation before going on.

1. Export all of your blog posts

With WordPress you have access to a tool for exporting all of your content into an XML file format.  Do not worry about what XML is, or why it exports to this format. What you need to know here is how to export and where the file saves, let the rest be taken care of by WordPress.

To get to the export tool go to the left sidebar and click the downward arrow next to tools like so:

Click the arrow here

The menu will look like this when it expands:

Expanded Tools Menu

Now click the “Export” link, and you will see the following:

The Export Page

You can choose which author you want to export, but for our purposes we are moving ALL the content, so we chose to leave it on “All Authors”.  When you hit the download button, you will be prompted to open or save the file. Just save the file in a location on your computer where you can find it easily.

2. Import all of your blog posts

Once you have an export file saved to your computer, you are ready to go back to the same Tools Menu from above, but on your new blog site. Click on “Import”.  Here, you will see a page that looks like this:

Since we are going to import from a WordPress blog, click the blue “WordPress” link at the bottom to see this page:

Just like a normal upload form, click the browse button to choose the file you downloaded in the preview step. Then click “Upload and Import”, which will allow your new website to pick up the posts you exported.

You may get an option on the next page, which will say “Import and Download all attachments”, DO THIS. It will allow WordPress to download the attachments in each of your original posts from your old server and put them on your new server. This will let you keep the great content you worked so hard to create the first time.

The last option you get is what user to import all the posts as. Go ahead and choose the username you want all of your posts to show up under.

Once you see all the posts are on your new site, you are ready to make sure that ALL traffic from your old domain go to your new one.

3. Setup .htaccess on the old blog to redirect all your traffic

The .htaccess file is a little file that works in the background on your server.  It is typically used to tell the server some special action to perform whenever a page is requested.  In this case, we are going to tell it to redirect ANY traffic from the old domain to the new domain and make sure the URLs are similar. This is important because if someone goes to your post about how delicious spam is on the old server, you want them to go to the same post on the new server.

You can actually just download an example .htaccess file with the link below. You will need to edit the part that says “old domain” and the part that says “new domain” to be your old and new domains, respectively.  The rest of the code in the file is exactly the same as what WordPress has you put in by default.

Example .htaccess file

You will actually edit the .htaccess file that comes with WordPress to have this extra content (this is in the example download above):

DO NOT WORRY about the other code, just find this block and change the URLs appropriately.

The final code will look like this:

Once you have the file edited with your new URL, just upload it to your OLD server so that it replaces the old .htaccess file.

Now, try to go to the old website with any blog post link (search Google for pages from your site),  and see what happens to the URL when you go there. You should see the URL change to the new server’s domain with the same post path as you selected.

You are now set up and ready to go on your new server.

This is a question that I feel a lot of people thing they know, or are too afraid to ask so they just assume certain things.  Hopefully, after this article things will be much clearer.

In order to have a website, you have to have these 3 things:

1. Domain

A domain or “domain name” is the text that people type into the address bar of their browser in order to get to your website. For example, when you go to Google, you would type “google.com”, this is Google’s Domain name.  The domain name becomes part of the URL.  Where google.com is the domain name, the URL would be http://google.com.

You can get a domain through a registrar. The registrars job is to sell domains that are not already taken, you will never be able to buy a domain that is currently owned, unless the owner is selling it to you directly.

Domains may be found with the Top Level Domain (TLD) of “.com”, “.org”, “.net” or “.info” as well as many many other different TLDs.

2. Web Host

The web host is a company that manages multiple web servers, the operating system on those servers, and the network the servers are on which allow them out to the internet.  Typically people will rent space on a server from the web host.  This space is where your website is physically located. You can push files to the server, which will make up the website when you view it in the browser.

When you rent space on a server you can get “shared” hosting, “virtual dedicated” hosting and “dedicated” hosting.  Shared means that there are many people on the same server, usually these accounts are cheaper but you have to share the server with other people. You will NOT be able to access other people’s data on the server. With Virtual Dedicated, you are given more space and more of the server’s resources just for your own website.  With dedicated, you are given the entire server, which means all of the hardware for this server is allocated to your website only.

3. Website Code

The website code is what tells the server what you are going to display to your users when they visit your site.  This code can be anything from a simple business card website to a more complex website like Amazon.com.  All of the code for a website basically boils down to few text files being read by the server, processed and then the results are displayed in the browser.

A common server software that many people use is Wordpress.  Wordpress is blog software written in PHP, which you download and then put on your server. This software creates the look, feel, and functionality of the website for both the visitors and authors of the blog.

The information above is very generic, but it should give you at lease a better idea of what you will need to get a website.  As always with my articles, if you have questions or want more information about a specific topic, please leave a comment.