Transferring hosting from bluehost to WP

  • Unknown's avatar
    thegift73 · Member ·

    Hi,

    I have been looking after a friends site for the past 3 years now and have always had the site hosted at bluehost. This is also where I registered the domain name as well.

    What I would like to do now is to have the site hosted with WordPress (not self-hosted) but to retain the domain name which I purchased 3 years ago via bluehost. I am happy to have bluehost remain as mt domain registrar, but want the hosting moved to WordPress.com as the hosting is free and he only gets a few hits, if that, a day and the hosting costs of bluepress are showing as quite a bit per month (I had it set to auto-renew every 3 years and the price has shot up from $4.99 per month to $10.99 per month.)

    I created the site using WordPress software and paid for the theme, so I am hoping that transferring the required files over to WordPress.com may be fairly straightforward.

    I have never actually transferred a site over to WordPress.com before, so can you explain how I would go about this is a simple to understand fashion. I have access to the cPanel at bluehost as well as the ftp info, so can also access the required files that way as well.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    Regards,

    Richard

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    HI there,

    To transfer a site to us, you’ll need to first create a new free site here. You can do that via this link:

    https://wordpress.com/start/site/

    Once you have the free site, log into the WP-Admin dashboard of the Bluehost site, go to Tools ->Export, and download a .xml export file of the site.

    Then come back to WordPress.com, go to My Sites ->Settings ->Import for the new site, and import the file there. That will transfer all the posts and pages, and you’ll get a notification when it’s done. After you get the notification, we’ll pull over any media files as well that’s on the Bluehost site. Make sure you don’t delete that site or disconnect the domain until you’ve checked that all media files also made it across.

    Moving from a Self-Hosted WordPress to WordPress.com

    The theme you’re using on that site can’t be used here – self-hosted WordPress themes are not compatible with WordPress.com – so you’ll need to pick a theme at My Site ->Themes instead.

    The domain will need to stay registered with Bluehost, but you can connect it to the site here using the domain mapping upgrade. You’ll need a paid plan to add domain mapping, but you can use our Personal Plan at $36 a year, which is much less than either $4.99 or $10.99 a month :)

    Let me know if you have any questions about this process.

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