Bringing a blog across

Import takes a blog from somewhere else and puts it here. The promise it makes, and the one everything else is arranged around, is that your addresses come with you: a post at oldsite.com/the-long-way-round is a post at yourdomain.com/the-long-way-round afterwards.

That is not a nicety. Every link anybody has ever shared to your writing, every result in a search index, every reference from somebody else's site: all of it points at an address. Rebuilding a blog with new addresses throws that away, and no redirect you write by hand afterwards gets all of it back.

Importing is free, and an administrator has to be the one to run it.

Get an export

Most platforms will give you a file. The wizard shows you where to click for the one you name:

WordPress is Tools → Export → All content.

Ghost is Settings → Labs → Export your content.

Substack is Settings → Exports → New export.

Medium is Settings → Account → Download your information.

Blogger is Settings → Manage blog → Back up content.

Squarespace is Settings → Import & Export → Export → WordPress.

Webflow is Open the collection → Export.

For everything else, see what each export brings across.

Drop the file in

You do not have to tell us what it is. The file is read and identified: a WordPress WXR, a Ghost JSON, a zip of Markdown, a CSV, an RSS feed, an HTML archive. If it genuinely cannot be identified, you are asked which platform it came from and it is read again with that answer.

Nothing is written to your blog during this step. What you get is a plan.

Read the plan

The plan is the screen worth slowing down on, because it is your one chance to see what will happen before it happens.

It counts what it found, split into what is new and what already exists here under the same address.

It lists what will arrive: posts, pages, drafts, authors, categories, tags, pictures, and redirects.

It warns about what it cannot do perfectly. Dates with no time zone, a slug that a web address cannot carry, a picture it could not fetch, a shortcode with no equivalent here. Each warning says what it will do instead.

Four decisions

Clashes is what to do when a post here already uses an address in the export. Skip it and yours is left alone. Replace ours and theirs wins. Keep both and theirs moves aside to a nearby address.

Bring drafts too. Drafts arrive as drafts. Nothing unpublished ever becomes public, whichever way you set this.

Members-only posts. A members-only post can arrive unlisted, meaning readable by anybody with the link but absent from the feed and the archives. Left off, those posts arrive as drafts instead.

The old site's time zone, which appears only when your export gave dates without one. Answer it and the dates land where they should; skip it and they land an hour or two out.

Let it run

The import runs in the background. You can close the tab.

The screen shows what it is doing and keeps a log: what was created, what was skipped and why, what it could not fetch. Every line names the post it is talking about.

If a deploy or a restart interrupts it, it resumes rather than starting again or stopping half-done. A post already imported is not imported twice.

What arrives

Posts and pages with their bodies converted to the blog's own format, their addresses, their dates and their statuses.

Pictures, downloaded and re-hosted here, with the posts rewritten to point at the copies. A picture that cannot be fetched leaves a warning naming the post, so you can replace it rather than discovering it a month later.

Authors, categories and tags, created as needed and attached to the right posts.

Redirects for anything whose address genuinely had to change, and for the old platform's own URL shapes where they are known. See redirects and old links.

Afterwards

Two things are worth ten minutes.

Look at five posts, ideally your longest, your most image-heavy and your oldest. Converted formatting is where the surprises are.

Check the media library's alt text count. Most platforms do not export alt text reliably, and the library will tell you exactly how many pictures need a description.

You can import again later. The wizard is not a one-time thing, and running it a second time with the same file changes nothing, because a post that is already here under the same address is recognised.