Don’t Pay Automattic $40 to Migrate Your WordPress.com Site
More and more people are asking how to move on from WordPress. Here's how I cheaply & easily accomplished this using Ghost.
The ongoing drama between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine (which has also ensnared Automattic, The WordPress Foundation, and WordPress.org) is leading some to reconsider their relationship with the WordPress software. It reminded me of my own minor incident involving WP's benevolent dictator for life.
If you’re a customer hosting your site on WordPress.com and are seeking a cheap & easy way to get your content out into a different CMS, this blog post is for you!
The journey away from WordPress
My blog is powered by Ghost, but for the longest time (2007 - 2024) it was powered by WordPress. I self-hosted at first, but eventually moved to WordPress.com when I grew tired of maintaining the stack. Since my blog was super-vanilla, their cheapest tier worked well for me ($4 / month pre-paid for a year).
However, I continued to be frustrated by the WordPress software. Trying to write anything in the block editor was tedious. I grimaced each time I looked at a UI which felt like it hadn’t changed in a decade! Ads were automatically inserted into my blog. The pain was adding up.
After exploring some alternate approaches such as Jeckyl & Eleventy, I eventually settled on Ghost, which runs super-cheap and easy on PikaPods Sure I was returning to self-hosting, but the trade-offs were worth it since I was saving nearly 90%!
Now the hard part: getting my data out of WordPress.com. Ghost has an official migration plugin that works well — if you can access it. However, WordPress.com gate-keeps certain WP features (just like they accuse WP Engine of doing) and doesn’t let you run plugins unless you are using at least their Business tier at $40 / month!
Getting out of WordPress.com cheaply
Rather than wasting money paying Automattic, I instead did the following for literally 1/5th of a penny:
- Exported my WordPress.com data to JSON using their Export tool
- Created a PikaPods account
- Using their quick-deploy option, created two new pods running the following:
- Pod #1: running WordPress
- Pod #2: running Ghost
- Logged into Pod #1’s WordPress instance
- Imported my WordPress.com export generated in the first step
- Spent some time to cleanup posts, tags, etc., to get rid of any junk / cruft I don’t want to carry-over
- Installed the Ghost plugin
- Using the plugin, export Pod #1’s content into Pod #2’s Ghost instance
- Paused Pod #1 to save costs
The amount spent operating that temporary WordPress pod cost me a grand total of 0.21318¢ — slightly cheaper than $40. 😄 Especially since PikaPods gives all new users a $5 starting credit!
Anyway, good luck and fuck Matt Mullenweg.
