How to Easily Transfer Your WordPress Site to FTP – Step-By-Step Instructions

Have you ever wanted to easily transfer your WordPress site to FTP (or another platform)?

Inevitably, when launching a new website or brand, you’ll want to know how to easily move your existing content to the new site. For example, let’s say you’re launching a new blog on WordPress and you already have a website built on a different platform (like Shopify or Joomla). You’ll want to find a way to transfer your content (including articles, videos, and other elements) over to the new site. 

This can be a cumbersome process. Trying to manually transfer every item one by one, especially if you have more than a few items, can be extremely time-consuming. Did you know there’s an easy way to do this?

You can use a WordPress plugin called “WordPress SEO Content Transfer.” 

With this plugin, you can easily import all your existing content from one site to another — and it does all the work for you! The plugin connects to your existing WordPress site, finds all the content and pulls it into the new site. From there, you can either move it to your chosen hosting platform (FTP, for example) or keep it in your WordPress site for future reference.

As a content marketer, one of the things I love about this plugin is that it understands the value of authoritative content. So if you have any guest posts, move them over first. After that, you can bring over your other content types (such as product reviews or guides).

You’ll need to install this plugin on both the old and new sites. To get started, visit www.wordpress.com and click on the Plugins tab. From there, you can click on the Install button to install the WordPress plugin. 

After you’ve installed it, click on the Settings button to open the plugin’s settings page. Here you can find the connection information for your old (WordPress) site. You’ll need to fill in the details of your new site, including the FTP details (if you’re moving to a different hosting platform).

Once you enter this information, click on the Save button to make sure you don’t lose it when you close the settings page. You’ll now be able to connect to your old WordPress site to begin the process of importing everything. 

Step 1: Visit the Old Site

To begin the process of transferring content from your existing WordPress site, you’ll need to visit it first. Since you installed the plugin on this site, you’ll see a Content Transfer tab on the admin panel. Click on this tab to see a list of all your content.

This content can be broken down into two categories: the imported content and the remaining content. The imported content will be the content that was automatically transferred over from your existing site to the new one. The remaining content will be everything else—your original content, images, videos, etc.

Check the boxes next to the content that you want to transfer, then click on the Start Import button. You’ll see a progress bar show how the content is being transferred. When it finishes, you’ll be presented with a success message. 

If you have a large number of items to transfer, it can take a while to complete. During this time, you can click on the Stop Import button to temporarily stop the process. When you click on this button, you’ll see a success message and the remaining items will be marked as incomplete. You can click on the Start Import button again to continue the process. 

Step 2: Test The New Site

After you’ve successfully transferred all your content from your old site to your new site, you can test it to ensure everything is working properly. To begin, click on the Tools tab on the admin panel. Next, click on the Import button to open the Import plugin’s settings page. Here you can find the connection information for your new site (including the FTP details if you’re moving to a different hosting platform).

Once you’ve entered this information, click on the Save button to make sure you don’t lose it when you close the settings page. You’ll now be able to import all your content from your new site to the dashboard of your WordPress.com account.

Step 3: Move Unused Content To A Subfolder

The last step in the process of moving content from one site to another is to move the unused content—that is, content that you do not want to keep on your new site. This content can be kept in a subfolder of your WordPress site’s content area. So, if you have a blog post titled “How to Easily Transfer Your WordPress Site to FTP”, you could move it to a subfolder called “FTP.”

To do this, return to the WordPress dashboard of your new site and navigate to Settings > Reading. Here you can find a Setting named “File Permissions.” Give the subfolder you created a bit of a different name, like “My Blog” or “FAQs” and change the Group to be Custom. 

Now when you upload new content to this subfolder, it will be attached to the original post and can be cross-referenced. For example, if a reader clicks on a blog post titled “How to Easily Transfer Your WordPress Site to FTP”, they’ll be taken to the FAQs subfolder where they can easily find the information they need.

Wrapping Up

In this article, we walked you through the process of easily transferring your WordPress site to FTP (or another hosting platform). This is a cumbersome process, especially if you have a lot of content. Trying to manually transfer every item one by one can be extremely time-consuming. Using a WordPress plugin called “WordPress SEO Content Transfer”, you can easily import all your existing content from one site to another. So instead of spending countless hours copying and pasting content, you can spend that time creating new content or expanding your existing content’s reach to new platforms.