How to Import WordPress Posts from a Hosting Account to a WordPress Website
Are you the owner of a WordPress website that you built using Bluehost? If so, you’re in luck because we’ve got an awesome deal for you. Bluehost is currently offering the Early Bird Special for the first 400 signups, so you can import your entire WordPress blog to their platform for free. Once you’ve signed up, you will be presented with the option to import your posts from your previous hosting account. Since Bluehost is the #1 web host used by WordPress, this option will be right next to the “Import” button. Before you start, however, it is essential that you prepare the following:
Your Previous Hosting Account
Although you can’t go back and change what happened in the past, you can modify the future by taking care of the situation now. It’s vital that you deal with this issue because a WordPress website without posts will not do. Even though you’re getting the blog for free on Bluehost, you still need to have content to display. Bluehost will give you a small space to store your website, along with a free domain, but without any content, you will not be able to generate any traffic or sales. To combat this issue, you need to take care of the following steps:
1. Create a backup of your website
As the owner of a WordPress website, you know that this platform is incredibly powerful and that it can do a lot more than you might think. This is why it’s so important to take the time to back up your site regularly. It’s also essential that you test your backups and restore methods on a regular basis. The reason for this is that if something happens and you lose all your website’s content, you’ll be incredibly frustrated because you won’t have anything to fall back on. To create a backup of your site, you can use a service like CrashPlan, which is one of the best and most popular online backup solutions. Not only will this service allow you to create regular backups of your site, but they’ll also give you the option to restore your site quickly if it ever becomes unavailable. For more information, visit this link: https://crashplan.com/
2. Find out what posts aren’t available
As mentioned above, Bluehost will give you a free website with a limited amount of storage space. When you first set up your site with Bluehost, you’ll be presented with the option to import your posts from your previous hosting account. When you click on this button, you’ll be taken to a page that lists all of the posts on your previous hosting account. If you’ve been building your blog for a while and have a lot of content, this list will likely be a long one. Before you start making any changes, however, it’s important to find out what’s missing from this list. To do this, you can use the search bar at the top of the page to search for any specific words or terms that may appear in any of your posts. When you find a post that’s not available on your new website, you can click on the following link and it will download a zipped folder containing all the content in that post. Once you’ve downloaded all of the posts, you can go through them one by one and either move them to your new blog or delete them completely.
3. Delete outdated posts
Since we’re focused on impressing current and potential customers with our blogs, it’s important to keep them fresh. Sometimes, when we’re in a rush to get our blogs online, we’ll write about topics that are a little more contemporary and a little less relevant to our target audience. When this happens, the posts can start to lose some of their charm and become a little dull. To keep your content interesting, you need to go through your posts and delete any that are a little outdated. When you do this, you’ll be able to see the positive effect right away because your reader will be introduced to content that is more in line with what they’re looking for.
4. Make sure you have a.com domain
If you want to be able to reach a large audience, you need to have a.com domain name. Even if you get free storage space from Bluehost, you’ll still need to pay for a.com domain. To learn more about why you need a.com domain, visit this link: Why Do I Need a.com Domain?
The.com domain is a domain used by the majority of the world’s most popular websites. Many people think that getting a.com domain will automatically get them to the top of the search engine rankings. While this may be true, it is more beneficial to have a.com domain for branding purposes. If you have a.net domain or a.gov domain, you can use these domains for your business as well if you want to. Just make sure you have a.com.
5. Check the domain availability
If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the past year or so, you may have heard about the massive surge in cybercrime that’s been taking place. In January 2019, Google reported that it had removed 23 million pieces of spam from its platforms since 2018. The worst part of this is that a lot of this spam consists of malware and viruses that are disguised as tempting offers or funny stories.
This is why it’s important to make sure that the.com domain you choose is actually available. Before you start making any changes, you can use a service like Domain Name Dispute to check whether or not the domain you want is taken. When you create the blog with Bluehost, you’ll be given the choice of a domain that they’ve already taken care of for you or you can choose a custom domain. If you go with the second option, enter your desired domain in the field provided and click on the Check Domain Availability button. You’ll be presented with a notification when the domain is still available, or if it’s already been claimed. If the latter happens, you’ll need to choose another domain or contact the support team to have them intervene on your behalf.
6. Check the email template
When you first set up your new blog with Bluehost, you’ll be provided with an email template. This is a standard email that you can use to send automated email alerts to your subscribers. When you click on this template, you’ll be taken to a page that explains how to use it. Make sure that you’re happy with how the email looks before you start sending out any emails using this template. If you are, however, still in the testing phase and want to be able to send out personalized emails to your subscribers, you can use the “contact us” form on your site to get in touch with the support team. They’ll be able to help you set up your email preferences once you’ve signed up with Bluehost.
7. Get a professional-looking design
If you’re looking to impress current and potential customers with your blog, it’s important to have a design that’s both eye-catching and functional. Since we already established the fact that you need a.com domain, let’s work on making your site look like a business that’s taken care of themselves; therefore, the design needs to reflect that. To do this, you can use a tool like Squarespace to build your website.
Once you’ve signed up with Squarespace, you’ll be presented with the option to import your posts from your previous hosting account. When you do this, you’ll be given the choice of a free template that they’ve already prepared or you can choose a custom design. If you go with the latter, you can enter any text or images you like and get a fully designed website in no time at all.
As you can see, preparing a WordPress blog for import is fairly simple. Once you’ve done all of this, you can hit the “Publish” button and start receiving traffic. If you want, you can also give your blog a name that will be associated with the posts that you publish on it. For example, if you want to create a travel blog, you can give it the name “Travel With Lori” and each time you post, you’ll be able to reference that name.