My Site Migration Experience Wasn’t Great

Ok. I think I finally got everything back up and running after attempting my site migration from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. If so, then I’m completely self-hosted! Woo! And I’m NEVER going through that again folks, so this is it.

None of the WordPress migrator plugins worked for me. Because I was originally on WordPress.com Premium, which doesn’t allow plugins. So wherever you read that there is a special migrator plugin that makes moving-over your site super-easy… it doesn’t apply to you unless you are on WordPress.com Business or WordPress.org already. I’m kinda upset they never clarified that. The wording always implied that the plugin works for WordPress. Period.

I feel tricked, bc I didn’t find out about that criteria until AFTER I already paid and started the installation process.

I even contacted SiteGround support about it, and they didn’t help me. They explained that the plugin wouldn’t apply to me and referred me to WordPress support. So now I don’t even believe what they say about excellent customer support either.

Anyhow, so I had to move over everything using the exporter / importer tool, which I actually don’t have any complaints over. THAT was super easy. But I’m still upset that the original path I had intended and planned for was denied to me. AND I’m still upset that I had to figure out my new course of action completely on my own. SiteGround support didn’t help me figure that out.

So after exporting everything, I did have to setup my theme, widgets, menus, categories, etc all over again. None of that stuff got transferred over. Also, none of my followers carried over either. That matter became another engagement with SiteGround support and they again referred me to WordPress. Didn’t help me at all.

I had to spend alot of time Googling that solution on my own, and finally installed the JetPack plugin for it. So far, it seems to have worked, but I’m not 100% sure.

Anyhow, I think I’ve gotten to a stopping point. I’m tired of working on it. Still kinda sour over the whole thing too. But will you all please let me know if something isn’t working for you anymore? I’m still in fix-it mode over this whole thing.

And I’m especially worried about Comments. They weren’t working last night, and I’m not sure if they’re fixed yet. I’m guessing the problem might originate with comments from Reader, but I’m not sure. I’ve reached out to WordPress support about this more than 8 hours ago, and I finally received an email response back from them saying they don’t know what my problem is. So I’m on my own. Again.

I’m not doing anything crazy with my site, so the fact that 3 separate instances of reaching out to support for basic needs have gone unmet, have left a poor impression with me. Because any direction at all from them, would have saved me HOURS of Google research and trial-and-error on my own.

I hope you all have been enjoying a better weekend than I have.

9 Replies to “My Site Migration Experience Wasn’t Great”

  1. Wow! You’ve got me thinking about Keeping my WordPress.com site and just starting a WordPress.org site from scratch! Two separate sites. I don’t think I want to be pulling my hair out and risk losing what I’ve worked so hard to build. How I wish I’d started off with WordPress.org!

      1. Thank you, Pepper. It’s just a thought. But I’m definitely going to have to make a decision and the advice I’m getting is to go self-hosted. I still may bite the bullet and do that. Decisions, decisions 🤔 😅

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