Many people start launching their first website using Weebly because it is quick to set up and free, but in the long run, most owners of this website may want to add more development and modernization to their sites, and achieve more control over the site.
In this case, there is no need to create a new website from scratch, as moving from Weebly to WordPress is the ideal option. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to do this and you want to convert your site with all its content to WordPress without having to create a new site again, this article will provide you with help to do that.
In this article, we will transfer or convert your Weebly website to a WordPress website step by step. We will also give some tips on preparing your website before doing the actual conversion, and we will suggest to you, dear reader, some of the effective plugins that enable you to customize and design your website. So, let’s get started.
Prepare and configure some settings before converting to WordPress
In the beginning, you need to set up your own hosting and purchase the domain for your website, as the WordPress system is known to be free and open source, but you need to pay costs to purchase the domain and hosting for your website.
Moving from Weebly to WordPress is not an intuitive thing, but we will try to clarify all the information about this conversion, so first we must understand the difference between Weebly and WordPress.
The difference between Weebly and WordPress
There is a big difference between Weebly and WordPress. The Weebly system is considered a website builder and provides you with everything you need to start and publish your site, starting with website creation tools, hosting, domain registration, SSL certificate, templates, and full support.
However, although it provides you with almost everything you need to create your site, in return, you will lose a lot of control over your site if you use it, because it is not open source, so you cannot modify the code or format the site’s graphical interfaces as you want.
You will also not be able to choose a third-party hosting provider, and your domain will always be a subdomain from the Weebly website, as it is intended for users who want to start their own website and not for professional website developers.
Unlike WordPress, which is considered one of the content management systems (CMS: Content management System), it is an open source system and you can modify its code and add many countless features and additions to customize your site as you want.
So, without a doubt, WordPress gives you a much greater degree of flexibility in dealing, as you can completely customize the appearance of your site, choose the hosting that suits you, customize your site’s domain, and many other countless features.
Steps to convert from Weebly to WordPress
There are several steps to transfer the entire site from Weebly to WordPress, which we will explain in detail in the following paragraphs.
1 – Register and purchase your domain name
If you already have your own domain name , skip this step. But since Weebly has a plan that enables you to own a free domain for your website in the following form (example.weebly.com), most users who create websites through it adopt it and ignore purchasing their own domain name.
Therefore, if you have not purchased a domain name for your website, this step is necessary. Obtaining a distinctive domain name of your own will make it easier to find your website address (URL) and make your site more professional.
There are many options to purchase your domain name from.
2- Purchase hosting
The second step is to purchase web hosting for your site, which enables you to store all the site files on the hosting servers, which includes (database, source codes, images, plugins…) and all the other things that you need to put on your WordPress site.
Some of the best hosting sites:
If you purchased the domain and hosting from the same company, go directly to the next step. If the hosting is from one company and the domain is from another company, you must link the domain to the hosting so that your site is launched to users correctly.
3- Install WordPress on the hosting
There are several ways through which you can install WordPress on your hosting. The installation method may differ depending on the hosting system you chose. In general, you can see the following article for more information about installing WordPress on hosting.
Once you have completed the process of installing WordPress correctly, you now have all the infrastructure basics that support building your website with WordPress (domain name, hosting provider, and WordPress work environment) and you are ready to begin the next step, which is exporting or migrating your site.
4- Transfer your website from Weebly to WordPress
There are several ways you can migrate your website content from Weebly to WordPress either manually, using custom plugins, or using third-party tools.
Manual transmission
To do the migration manually, simply copy and paste the content from one place to another. So go to your Weebly site, copy whatever content you want, paste it into your new WordPress posts and create the pages on the new site. Of course you also need to save images from your Weebly site and then manually upload them into your WordPress media library.
The good thing about manual migration is that you make sure every piece of content arrives correctly and exactly the way you want it. But working this way is possible if you only have a little content to copy.
But on the other hand, if you have very large content, it will take a long time to manually copy and paste it into your WordPress site, so we recommend that you use dedicated plugins to create pages and articles in bulk, such as ( Bulk Page Creator ) to make the task of creating them faster and copy the content to it from your Weebly site and paste it in The right article or page on your new site.
Transfer using external tools
You can use many useful additional third-party tools for this purpose. Just be aware that sometimes you need to correct some of your content after importing because some automated components don’t always work as expected!
You can use many tools, such as WP All Import plugin or Weebly to WordPress Importer Too l and others.
In this article, we will use the Weebly to WordPress Importer Tool. It is a free online tool that imports Weebly content and converts it into an import file in a WordPress-compatible format.
All you have to do is go to the previous link and after opening it, the tool page will appear in front of you as follows.


In the first field, enter the web address of your Weebly website, and in the second and third fields, enter your name and email. Then choose through the radio buttons the file format you want to export (choose the WXR format that is compatible with WordPress)
Finally, choose Yes if you want to include your pages in the export to Weebly, or No if you do not want that, then click on the (Export my Weebly Website) button.
Once you click on the (Export my Weebly Website) button, the process of exporting all your content on the Weebly website will begin. It will be converted into a WordPress-compatible export file, and you will be asked to download it to your personal device in XML file format, as in the following figure.


Thus, we have exported the website in Weebly to a file in a format that is compatible with the WordPress website. We only have to step to import this file into WordPress.
To do this, log in to the admin control panel of your WordPress site, click on ( Tools ), then choose the command ( Import ), then search for the WordPress option and click on the Install Now link . If you have not created your WordPress website yet, we advise you to check out the guide to creating a WordPress website .


After the installation of the import add-on is complete, the phrase ( Run the importer ) will appear. Once you click on it, you will go to the next page, which asks you to choose the file you want to import.
Choose here the file that you downloaded to the personal device in the previous step. After ensuring that the file is downloaded, click on the ( Upload the file and import it ) button as shown in the following image.


WordPress will import the content from the export file into your WordPress database. It will also attempt to fetch the images linked to your Weebly blog posts and pages if you enable the File attachment import option .
Once completed, a message will be displayed showing you that the task was successful. To confirm, click on the articles on your site and review them to confirm whether all of your articles have been imported correctly.
If the import process fails to bring all the content, you can try to run it again. The importer will not re-import all the content again and will be able to detect duplicate content, skip it, and import only the content that was not successfully imported in the previous attempt.
Redirect Weebly visitors to a WordPress site
After making sure that all your files are imported correctly, the next thing you should do is set up redirects to make your Weebly domain name redirect your site visitors to your new WordPress site. to do this. Follow next steps:
1. Change the domain
To do this, go to the Domains area in your WordPress hosting control panel ( Cpanel ) to find the host’s nameservers for your site.
Once you have the nameservers for your new site, go to the domain page for your site in Weebly, then select the host name of the old domain, click Change, then enter the new domain host for the WordPress site, then click Save.
2. Permalink management
Weebly sites use the post title format: yourwebsite.com/blog/post-title (HTML) at the end of the URL.
While WordPress uses web address structure in different ways, which results in users visiting your articles using old URLs and will end up on 404 error pages.
You can fix this by going to your WordPress dashboard, clicking on Settings > Permanent Links , selecting the Custom Combination option , then copying your web URL from the Weebly site, or entering the following format for /blog/%postname% in the text field then Then click Save Changes .


3. Add .html to the end of WordPress page URLs
The easiest way to do this is by installing and activating the Add Any Extension to Pages extension on your site, then go to the Settings section in your site’s control panel and choose the name of the extension. A window will appear with a single text box. Type. html in it, and click the Update Settings button to update the settings.


4. Troubleshoot any errors during the migration and fix them manually
During the conversion process, you may find some broken internal links on your new site, so you should go through all your articles and pages and check and edit each link to make sure they are directing you to the right pages on your site.
You can read the following article How to Check and Fix Broken Links in WordPress for more information about this step.
Conclusion
Here, dear reader, we have finished our article in which we explained in detail the method of transferring your site from Weebly to WordPress, which is flexible enough to allow you to enjoy many features and additions that Weebly will not provide you, without losing your content on the Weebly site. We also highlighted how not to lose your visitors on the Weebly site and transfer them directly to your new site in WordPress.
Of course, always remember that the WordPress system is constantly evolving and has many modern add-ons available, so there are constantly other ways and add-ons to do this task, and you have complete freedom, dear reader, to choose the method that suits you to accomplish this task perfectly.
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