How to Properly Move from Medium to WordPress

Medium is a solid platform, but it doesn’t offer the same flexibility as WordPress. If you’re looking to grow your blog or take more control, WordPress is the better choice.

We use WordPress on our own websites, and it handles thousands of pieces of our content with ease. Its powerful features make it the top platform for bloggers and creators.

In this article, we’ll guide you through the process of moving your blog from Medium to WordPress.

Why You Should Move from Medium to WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular website builder in the world, powering more than 43% of all websites on the internet.

This content management and blogging platform is also very easy to use, incredibly powerful, and easy to customize. If you want to learn more about WordPress and what you can do with it, you can see our complete WordPress review with pros and cons.

Now, when we say WordPress, we are talking about self-hosted WordPress.org. Not to be confused with WordPress.com, which is a hosted platform. For a full comparison, see our article on the difference between WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org.

While Medium is a good blogging platform for new writers, many users quickly realize that it’s quite limited when compared to WordPress. You don’t have full control of your website and customization options. You also can’t monetize it the way you may want to.

WordPress also provides a big advantage when it comes to building an SEO-friendly site. It allows you to optimize your on-page SEO and choose from responsive themes and templates to fit your brand identity.

If you have decided to switch from Medium to WordPress, then we want to congratulate you on making the right decision. We have created this complete step-by-step guide to help you move all your content from Medium to WordPress.

However, if you like learning and doing things yourself, then you can follow our step-by-step tutorial below.

Here’s a breakdown of all the steps that we will be covering in this step-by-step tutorial:

Ready? Let’s get started!

Step 1. Install and Setup WordPress

To get started with WordPress, you’ll need the following two things.

• A web hosting account. This is where all your website files are stored.
• A domain name. This will be your website’s address on the internet and what users will type in their browser to reach your website. For example, wpbeginner.com.

A domain name typically costs around $14.99 per year, and website hosting starts from $7.99 per month.

Thankfully, Bluehost, an official WordPress-recommended hosting provider, has agreed to offer our users a free domain name and over 60% off their web hosting service.

→Click Here to Claim This Exclusive Bluehost Offer ←

If, for some reason, you want other options, then you can look at our list of the best WordPress hosting companies.

Once you have set up your domain and hosting, the next step is to install WordPress.

Most WordPress hosting companies offer 1-click install options that you can use to instantly install WordPress. If you can’t find it, then ask your hosting provider’s support, and they will set it up for you.

You can also do it yourself. For step-by-step instructions, see our complete guide on how to install WordPress.

After you’re done installing WordPress, you’re ready to move on to the next step, which is to export your content from Medium.

Step 2. Exporting Your Data from Medium

Previously, it was quite difficult to export your data from Medium in a WordPress-compatible format.

We decided to solve this problem and developed a Medium to WordPress Importer tool.

It’s a free online tool that imports content from Medium and converts it into a WordPress-compatible export file. It does not change your existing Medium content, so it is perfectly safe to use.

Head over to Medium to WordPress Importer website and enter your Medium blog URL.

Now, if your Medium blog URL uses a custom domain name and is like http://example.com or https://something.example.com, then enter the URL with your name and email address.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a custom domain name, then the Medium to WordPress Importer will ask you to upload the Medium export file.

Here is how you can get that export file from Medium.

First, you need to log in to your Medium account and click on your profile photo at the top right corner of the screen. This will bring down the menu. From here, you need to click on the ‘Settings’ link.

This will take you to the settings page, where you need to scroll down to the ‘Download Your Information’ section.

Go ahead and click the ‘Download zip’ button to export your Medium data.

On the next page, you’ll want to click on the export button. Medium will then prepare your download and send a link to you via email.

You need to check your email to see if you received the email from Medium. Then, you can follow the link in the email to download your Medium export file.

Once you have downloaded the Medium export file, you can switch to the Medium to WordPress Importer tool and upload that file.

Next, let’s click the ‘Export My Medium Website’ button to continue.

Medium to WordPress Importer will now prepare your export file. Once finished, it will show you a success message with a button to download your WordPress-ready Medium export file.

Go ahead and download the export file to your computer. You will need that file in the next step.

Step 3. Importing Your Medium Articles into WordPress

Now that you have successfully exported your Medium content into a WordPress-compatible format, it’s time to import that content into your new WordPress blog.

To get started, you’ll want to visit the WordPress admin area and head over to Tools » Import.

Here, you will see a list of importers available for different platforms. Let’s scroll down to WordPress and click the ‘Install Now’ link.

WordPress will then fetch the importer plugin and install it on your WordPress site without reloading the page.

Once installed, you’ll need to click on ‘Run Importer’ to launch it.

This will bring you to the WordPress importer page. Go ahead and click the ‘Choose file’ button to select the export.xml file you downloaded earlier.

Next, you can go ahead and click the ‘Upload file and import’ button to continue.

WordPress importer will now upload and analyze your Medium export file. On the next screen, it will ask you to assign authors.

You can import the author from your Medium website, create a new author, or assign all content to your existing WordPress user.

Don’t forget to check the box next to the ‘Download and import file attachments’ option. It will fetch images from your Medium website and put them into your WordPress media library.

With that done, all that’s left to do is click the ‘Submit’ button to run the importer.

WordPress will then import content from the Medium export file. It will also try to fetch images in your Medium articles.

Upon completion, you’ll see a success message.

Congratulations, you have successfully imported content from Medium to WordPress!

You can now go to the posts page in your WordPress admin area to see if all your content is there.

If the import process fails in the middle, then you can always run it again. The importer is smart enough to detect duplicate content and skip it. It will only import the content that wasn’t imported successfully in the previous attempt.

Step 4. Importing Your Images From Medium to WordPress

The WordPress importer tries to import images from your Medium articles to the WordPress media library. However, it may fail due to how Medium displays images in your articles.

To solve this, you’ll first need to go to Media » Library to see all images that have been imported successfully.

If some or all of your images fail to import, then you will need to upload them again.

To replace broken images across your WordPress site, we recommend using the free Search & Replace Everything plugin by WPCode. This plugin addresses WordPress’s lack of a built-in find-and-replace feature, allowing you to replace outdated images site-wide with just one click.

For more details, you can see our step-by-step guide on how to easily replace image and media files in WordPress.

Alternatively, you can bulk update all articles at once to quickly import all images. For detailed instructions, see our step-by-step tutorial on how to import external images in WordPress.

Step 5. Setting up Redirects

If your Medium stories had a medium.com URL, then you cannot set up redirects.

But if you were using a custom domain for your Medium publication, then you can set up custom redirects in WordPress.

First and foremost, you will need to get all URLs of your Medium articles and save them in a text file. After that, you’ll start setting up redirects for all your articles.

There are multiple ways to set up redirects in WordPress. For detailed instructions, follow our beginner’s guide to creating redirects in WordPress.

Step 6. Installing a WordPress Theme

By default, WordPress comes with a pretty decent-looking design for your website. However, you can change it to anything else that you like. There are thousands of free and premium WordPress themes that you can use to customize your website.

Following are our expert picks of the best WordPress themes in various categories:

• Best free WordPress blog themes
• Best WordPress themes for writers
• Best WordPress themes for artists
• Best Medium-like WordPress themes

After you have chosen a theme, you can follow our guide on how to install a WordPress theme to set it up.

Step 7. Installing Essential WordPress Plugins

Plugins are like apps for your WordPress blog. They allow you to add new features and extend the functionality of your WordPress site. To learn more, see our article about what are WordPress plugins and how they work.

There are thousands of free and premium WordPress plugins that you can install on your website. At the time of writing this article, the WordPress.org plugin directory alone had more than 59,000 thousand free plugins.

So, how do you know if you need a WordPress plugin? More importantly, how do you find out the best WordPress plugin for the job?

Well, there are some WordPress plugins made for specific websites, such as eCommerce plugins, membership plugins, or LMS plugins.

Then, there are plugins that almost every website needs. Let’s install these plugins on your new WordPress site:

• WPForms Lite – This is the free version of WPForms, which is the best WordPress contact form plugin on the market. It allows you to easily add beautiful forms to your website.
• MonsterInsights Lite – This free version of the popular MonsterInsights plugin helps you install Google Analytics in WordPress. It also shows you beautiful reports about your most popular articles, where your users are coming from, and more.
• All in One SEO – This is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It helps you improve WordPress SEO and get more visitors from search engines.

Need more plugin recommendations? Check out our pick of the essential WordPress plugins every website should have.

Step 8. Learning WordPress

WordPress is quite easy to use. However, as a new user, you may need some help familiarizing yourself with the platform.

This is where WPBeginner can help. We are the #1 WordPress resource site with thousands of tutorials, guides, and videos created specifically for beginners, small businesses, and non-tech users.

Following are some of the helpful resources that you can find from WPBeginner (all of them are completely free).

• WPBeginner Blog – The central place for all our WordPress tutorials and guides.
• WPBeginner Dictionary – Our WordPress glossary is the best place to familiarize yourself with the WordPress lingo
• WPBeginner Videos – New WordPress users can start with these 23 videos to master WordPress.
• WPBeginner on YouTube – Need more video instructions? Subscribe to our YouTube channel with more than 1.03M subscribers and 53+ million views.
• WPBeginner Blueprint – Check out the plugins, tools, and services we use on WPBeginner.
• WPBeginner Deals – Exclusive discounts on WordPress products and services for WPBeginner users.

Video Tutorial

If you are more of a visual learner, you may want to check out our video tutorial:

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We hope this article helped you learn how to properly move from Medium to WordPress. You may also want to see our ultimate guide on how to improve your WordPress SEO and our comparison of the best email marketing services.

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