How to Migrate Followers from a WordPress.com Site

Your InMotion Hosting account allows you to host your own WordPress blog or website. If you are migrating your site from WordPress.com, you will be surprised and delighted by the amount of control you now have over your site. In this article, we will focus on migrating followers (your blog readers) from WordPress.com.

In order to grasp the concepts introduced here, we must separate the self-hosted WordPress installation and WordPress.com hosted site:

The “self-hosted” WordPress site is installed and controlled by you in your personal InMotion Hosting account. A site hosted on WordPress.com is managed and controlled by WordPress. This distinction becomes important when we are logged into both sites simultaneously to migrate followers.

Installing and Connecting the Jetpack Plugin

This article assumes that you have already installed the Jetpack Plugin and have connected it to your self-hosted WordPress site. If not, we will just recap the steps below.

1. Install Jetpack plugin
2. Connect Jetpack to WordPress.com
3. Log into WordPress.com

Begin the Migration at WordPress.com

This latter phase of the project brings everything together. Now that we are logged into WordPress.com, we can complete the migration process. Follow along with steps below:

1. Use Switch Sites to select the self-hosted site
2. Go to Settings
3. At the bottom of the page select the option to “Migrate followers from another WordPress.com blog”

Once confirmation of the migration goes through, you will receive an email letting you know that the process has finished. WordPress asks that you wait a few days at least for the new information to fully propagate.