Want to migrate your site from Weebly to WordPress and not sure how? Sit back, take your time and read our step-by-step guide. You’ll do it in (almost) no time and with no challenges and you’ll thank us later 🙂
Weebly vs. WordPress comparison
First of all, let us just cover the basic Weebly vs. WordPress comparison. Just in case you’re still not sure which platform to use and for what purpose.
Weebly is an easy going page—builder platform that can help you build websites and e-commerce shops in no time. And, while it is somewhat popular among novice users, the majority of people sure made their choice:
One simply can not argue with Google, right?
All jokes aside, Weebly might be slightly easier to use, especially if you have no coding experience whatsoever. But… Is it good enough for you to use it in a professional manner?
Weebly has 0.3 % market share, while WordPress powers more than 31% of worldwide websites. Speaking of design, Weebly has a limited amount of templates (around 50 or so) and add-ons that you can use to build a solid, good-looking, professional website or shop. While WordPress has unlimited choice of themes, plugins, and widgets that can transform any type of business into whatever you want.
And, we mentioned this before, one of the main advantages of WordPress is that you are the owner of your site and all around it. Yes, you can be with Weebly too, for a monthly fee, but still, be limited with the number of things you can actually do with it. If you’re keeping things simple with both the design and content, you can use Weebly, but for anything slightly more demanding you could find yourselves in a challenging situation.
That is why it’s recommended to use WordPress as a go-to solution for any hobby, business or an e-commerce solution. Thus, here goes step-by-step explanation how to do Weebly to WordPress site transfer.
How to migrate Weebly to WordPress?
Even if you have no experience with developing or coding, there are ways you can transfer Weebly to WordPress by yourself. WP Beginner made an awesome tool that helps, saving you both time, nerves and money for hiring a developer. So, let us explain the steps and guide you through the Weebly to WordPress migration.
Step One: WordPress blog or site
To be able to move from one platform to another, you’ll need to have a WordPress based blog or site. Choose a domain name, a good hosting provider, install WordPress and you’re good to go to the next step.
Step Two: Export Weebly blog or site
As I mentioned, there’s a free online tool that you can use to export your Weebly content and prepare it for WordPress. All you need to do is enter your Weebly website URL and some personal information, and it will import the content from Weebly and convert it into a WordPress compatible format you can export and use it for your WordPress based site.
Step Three: Import Weebly into WordPress
This one is pretty easy. Login to your admin panel, go to Tools then Import page where you’ll find several different systems to import from. Choose the last one – WordPress, install it and on your site then click on the Run Importer to launch it. Once you do that, choose the file you made in Weebly To WP, upload it and wait for the feature to upload the content. Before finishing, you’ll be asked to assign posts to exist user or create a new one, as well as to check for all Attachments to be imported. After that, you’re good to go to the next steps (just a few of them, promise!).
Step Four: Redirecting URLs
A very important step that you shouldn’t miss. Setting up redirects is what drive your users onto a new site you migrated from Weebly to WordPress. Otherwise, you might end up sending them to 404 Error pages which will cost you traffic and everything else that goes with it. So, how do you do it? It all depends whether you’re on a subdomain or your own domain, we’ll explain both ways.
In case you’re using Weebly’s subdomain, your URL will look like this:
Yoursitename.weebly.com
And you need to change it to
Yoursitename.com
Go to your Weebly account, then Edit, click on Settings then on SEO. Look up Header Code and type this line of code:
1 | <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.yourdomain.com/"> |
Be sure to click Save and Publish, so your changes are saved and implemented.
In case you’re using Weebly with your domain, here’s how to redirect URLs. Go to your Weebly account than to the Domains page, and click on the domain name you want to redirect. Within domain settings page you’ll find Edit Nameservers feature where you need to enter the new WordPress host’s nameservers, depending on which hosting company you use. If you’re not sure how to do it or not feeling up to it, you can always call host’s tech support for help; it’s done within minutes.
Step Five: Permalinks
Just like in the case with transferring from Blogger to WordPress, you need to set up permalinks so that the URL structure is in order.
Go to Settings, then Permalinks page and choose the option you like or make one within Custom Structure – we always recommend
https://example.com/blog/%postname%
or
https://example.com/%category/%postname%
The last part of the setting up Permalinks is getting sure you added .html extensions as well since pages contain them. For that step, you need to install Add Any Extension to pages plugin, activate it, add a .html extension in space and update settings. After you do that, you’ll need to return to the Permalinks page to save the settings and your posts and pages should work correctly.
Step Six: Importing images
An action you need to do separately if your images aren’t imported to the media library. Use Import External Images plugin that will help you use all the linked images from a post as gallery attachments for the specific post.
Wrapping up
If you follow the steps as we described it, moving from Weebly to WordPress will give you no trouble. What’s left to do is test your site and make some additional design changes /if you wish/ and go live with your new site on WordPress.
Do let us know how that worked out for you and if you’re looking for a good, secure, modern and responsive premium quality theme – be sure to check out our Themes page.
