After reading our tutorial comparing WordPress and Medium, several readers asked us how it was possible to switch from Medium to WordPress. If you are also in this case, then you are in the right place because that is what we will do throughout this tutorial.
Before you begin, here is a list of all the steps we will cover in our WordPress migration guide:
- Installation and configuration of WordPress
- Exporting Medium data
- Importing WordPress
- Importing Medium images onto WordPress
- Configuring redirects
Step 1. Installing and configuring WordPress
Unlike Medium, WordPress is a self-hosted platform. This means that you own and control all aspects of your website.
The first thing you need to do is install and configure WordPress. You will need a name of domain and web hosting on WordPress.
We recommend that you use either Bluehost ou SiteGround because both are officially recommended as the best WordPress web host.
Both of these providers offer solutions for beginners. After taking a accommodation, you will need to install WordPress. We have a complete step-by-step WordPress installation tutorial.
Once you have installed and configured WordPress, you will be ready to migrate.
Step 2. Exporting Medium data
Medium is an innovative editing platform with a lot of features that will help you easily publish your stories. However, when it comes to moving data, they don't offer better tools for it.
Using this tutorial, you will be able to move content from Medium to WordPress. However, you will not be able to import your subscribers, your mentions " I love And comments.
If you have a custom domain configuration on Medium, then you may be able to manually set up redirects from your Medium publications to your WordPress site. However, you will have to do it manually for each item.
That said, we will look at how to export your Medium data.
Sign into your account " Medium Then click on your profile picture in the upper right corner of the screen.
In this menu, click on the “Settings” link to access your account settings.
You need to scroll to the section " Export Content », Then click on the button« Download Zip ».
This will take you to the content export page. You must click on the button « Export ". Medium will then prepare a zip file with your articles and give you a link for you to download.
This email may take a long time, check your emails regularly. Inside this email you will have the link to download your export file.
You must now download this file and extract it.
Inside the extracted folder you will find your Medium articles in raw HTML format, you will also find an XML file called medium.rss.
You are now ready to upload your content to WordPress.
Step 3. Importing your articles on WordPress
First of all, you need to access the tools and install the "RSS" tool.
This will bring up a window to install the RSS plugin. You must click on the button « install now To install the tool.
WordPress will now download and install the plugin RSS Feed " on your website. You must then activate the tool & launch the importer.
On the next screen, you need to click the button to choose and select the file " medium.rss On your computer.
Click on the "Send File and Import" button to continue.
WordPress will now download the medium.rss file and import your posts. If successful, you will see the number of articles imported and a success message.
That's it, you've successfully imported your content from Medium to WordPress.
Step 4. Import your images from Medium to WordPress
The RSS importer will not be able to import images from your Medium posts to WordPress. These images will still be visible, but they will be loaded from Medium.
We recommend importing these images into your WordPress media library. To do this you will need to use a WordPress Plugin called " Import External Images ».
Step 5. Configuring redirects to a custom domain
If your Medium articles had a URL using the prefix Medium.com Then you can not configure redirects.
If you use a custom domain for your articles on " Medium You can configure custom redirects for WordPress.
First you will need to retrieve all the URLs for all of your articles " Medium And save them to a text file. After that, you have to start setting up redirects for all your articles.
There are several ways to configure redirects on WordPress. You can follow the instructions in our beginner's guide to create redirects in WordPress for detailed instructions.
That's it for this tutorial. Feel free to ask us questions if a point is not clear enough or to share the article with your friends.
