Export Your WordPress.com Blog for Any Contingency

Every few months you hear the same lesson, but few people pay any attention. Someone uses a free or nominal cost cloud service like Gmail and are left digitally destitute when their account is deactivated for inadvertent violation of terms. Or the new startup with the hot app for millions of users suddenly goes under because their admin account was hacked and all the virtual servers were deleted.

The life lesson depicted in these stories is: make a backup if you depend upon something digitally no matter how slick or reliable the technology.

You’ve spent hours or maybe years posting just the right words, so why not export a copy of your WordPpress.com blog today for any type of contingency?

For approximately $100 per year at WordPress.com, you get a custom theme and domain redirection. It’s well worth the money to escape the weekly security updates for hosted WordPress.org sites alone, not to mention the built-in search engine optimization and other valuable features. Also, Automattic handles the backup and promises to have your blog up in running in 1-2 days in the event of a catastrophic disaster.

However, it’s really your words that you likely want to reference for other projects or possibly move to another platform some day. Fortunately, exporting your blog is really easy:

In WordPress.com Admin, select Tools – Export – All Content – Download Export File.

WordPress Support has also published export instructions with a guided transfer for $129 and explanation of gotchas like custom fonts and how to export blog roll links.

The export file is in XML format for the purposes of importing into another blog. However, you can open the file with any type of editor and copy sections of text to paste into another application or platform.

You will notice that the first few lines of the XML file specifically state the file is not meant as a full backup of your blog. In addition, you should open the Media Library and manually download any images you wish to save to another location.

If you wanted to move to another blog, you simply import the XML file. You would need to select a theme, upload images, and perform other customizations like widgets. Regardless, you now have a copy of your hard work and intellectual property no matter what happens in the future.