Moving from Medium to WordPress: A Complete Migration Guide

Moving from Medium to WordPress takes most writers a single afternoon for the content itself, plus a week or two of cleanup on images, formatting and redirects. The export file Medium gives you is a ZIP of HTML files, not the WordPress XML format, so the import step needs a converter or a plugin built for it. Everything below follows the order I’d actually do it in, including the two things that quietly cost people traffic: canonical tags and lost subscribers.

What you gain and what you give up

Medium handles distribution, typography and hosting for you, and its internal recommendation engine can still send real readers to a new post. The trade is control. You don’t own the domain authority, you can’t install analytics or email capture the way you want, and your posts sit behind a paywall prompt you didn’t design.

On WordPress you own the database, the templates and the monetization. You also own the maintenance, which is why most people migrating pair the move with managed WordPress hosting for a business site rather than a bare VPS.

• Domain equity: links to yourname.medium.com build Medium’s authority, not yours.
• Email list: Medium never gives you follower email addresses, so the audience does not transfer.
• Revenue: the Partner Program pays per member read; on your own site you control ads, sponsorships, products and memberships.
• Design: Medium gives you one layout, WordPress gives you thousands plus custom CSS.

What breaks in the export (know this before you start)

Medium’s export delivers an HTML file per post inside a ZIP, along with drafts and comments you probably don’t want. The formatting survives reasonably well, but a few things reliably need hand repair after the import.

• Images stay hosted on cdn-images-1.medium.com unless your importer downloads them into the WordPress media library.
• Embeds (Tweets, YouTube, GitHub gists, CodePen) come through as Medium’s iframe wrappers and often render as blank blocks.
• Drop caps, section dividers and pull quotes lose their styling because those are Medium-specific classes.
• Tags do not map to WordPress categories automatically.
• Member-only posts export as full text, so decide deliberately what goes public.

Budget roughly 5 to 10 minutes per post for cleanup on a heavily illustrated archive, and closer to 2 minutes on plain-text essays. For 60 posts, that’s a realistic day of work.

Step 1: Export your Medium content

Open your Medium settings, find the Security and apps section, and request a download of your information. Medium emails a ZIP archive, usually within a few minutes, though large accounts can take a couple of hours. Unzip it and look inside the posts folder: filenames beginning with “draft_” are unpublished and can be deleted before you import anything.

Step 2: Set up WordPress first, not after

Install WordPress on the domain you intend to keep for the next decade. Pick the permalink structure now, before a single post exists, because changing it later means rewriting every redirect. I’d use /%postname%/ for a blog, since it’s short and matches how Medium slugs already read.

Choose hosting that matches what the site becomes, not what it is today. A writing archive is fine on hosting built for WordPress blogs, while anyone planning to sell access to their writing should look at membership hosting or course hosting, both of which need more PHP workers and better caching rules than a static blog.

Step 3: Convert and import the content

WordPress can’t read Medium’s HTML export directly. You have two workable paths, and the right one depends on how many posts you have.

1. Use a Medium-to-WordPress converter that turns the ZIP into a WordPress WXR (XML) file, then run it through Tools > Import > WordPress. This preserves titles, dates and body content in one pass.
2. Use an RSS-based import from your Medium feed (yourname.medium.com/feed). It’s quicker to set up but only returns the 10 most recent posts, so it suits small archives or a partial move.

Run the importer with “download and import file attachments” checked so images land in your own media library. The official WordPress documentation on importing content walks through the importer plugin if you haven’t used it before. After the import finishes, spot-check five posts at random: the oldest, the newest, and three with heavy media.

Related reading: Migrating from GoDaddy to Premium Managed WordPress Hosting.

For a closer look at this topic, see our guide: Joomla to WordPress Migration: Why the Switch is Still Worth It.

Step 4: Fix images, embeds and internal links

Search the database for “cdn-images-1.medium.com” using a search and replace plugin. Any hit means an image is still being served by Medium, which will break the day they change their CDN rules. Replace those with local URLs, then regenerate thumbnails so your theme’s featured images display correctly.

Rebuild embeds by pasting the raw URL onto its own line, since WordPress auto-embeds most major platforms. Then update internal links: posts that pointed at other Medium articles of yours should now point at the WordPress versions. This step is closely related to the process in our Ghost to WordPress migration walkthrough, where link rewriting is the same headache.

Step 5: Redirects, canonicals and keeping your rankings

This is where most migrations leak traffic. What you can do depends entirely on how your Medium blog was published.

• Custom domain on Medium: you control DNS, so point the domain at WordPress and map old slugs to new ones with 301 redirects. Rankings usually recover within 2 to 8 weeks.
• Subdomain (yourname.medium.com): you cannot set server-level redirects. Your options are to unlist or delete old posts, or edit each one down to a short summary with a prominent link to the new version.
• Canonical tags: if you originally published on your own site and syndicated to Medium, the canonical already points home and you have less to fix.

Google’s guidance on site moves with URL changes recommends keeping redirects live for at least a year, and I’d argue permanently if the cost is a few lines in a redirect table. Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console the same day you launch, and expect crawl volume to be uneven for the first fortnight.

Step 6: Rebuild the audience Medium kept

Your follower count does not migrate. Medium sends a notification to followers when you publish, and that mechanism disappears entirely once you’re on your own website, so the replacement has to be email. Install a form plugin and an email service before you announce the move, then publish a final Medium post explaining where you went and linking to the signup page.

Realistically, 3 to 10 percent of Medium followers convert to email subscribers. That sounds brutal until you remember those subscribers are yours, reachable without an algorithm’s permission, and worth far more per person.

Step 7: Harden and maintain the new site

Medium handled security patching invisibly; WordPress does not, unless your host does it for you. Turn on automatic minor core updates immediately, keep plugin count lean (under 20 is a sane target for a content site), and set a backup schedule before you have anything worth losing. Our notes on safe automated update workflows cover how to do that without waking up to a broken layout.

Add caching and a CDN on day one. A WordPress blog with server-level caching typically serves pages in under one second, which puts you roughly level with Medium’s default performance instead of behind it.

Realistic timeline and cost

• Export and import: 1 to 3 hours for most archives under 100 posts.
• Content cleanup: 4 to 12 hours depending on media volume.
• Redirects and Search Console: 1 to 2 hours, more if slugs differ widely.
• Hosting: commonly $5 to $30 per month for a personal or small business blog.
• Ranking recovery: typically 2 to 8 weeks with clean 301s in place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are people moving away from WordPress?

The most common reasons are maintenance load and plugin conflicts, which affect a minority of sites but generate loud complaints. WordPress still powers roughly 43 percent of all websites, so the net direction is toward it, not away. Managed hosting removes most of the friction people cite, since updates, backups and security run at the server level.

What is the best WordPress site migration tool?

For Medium specifically, a dedicated Medium-to-WXR converter plus the built-in WordPress Importer is the most reliable route, because Medium’s export is HTML rather than a database. For WordPress-to-WordPress moves, All-in-One WP Migration, Duplicator and Migrate Guru are the three most used. Many hosts also run the whole migration for you at no charge.

Which is better for my needs, Medium or WordPress?

Medium suits writers who want zero setup and are happy borrowing an audience; WordPress suits anyone building a brand, an email list or a product. If you publish more than about twice a month, or you want the traffic to compound into something you own, WordPress wins on a two-year view. Plenty of people run both, publishing first on WordPress and syndicating to Medium with a canonical tag.

Is All-in-One WP Migration good?

Yes for WordPress-to-WordPress transfers, with the caveat that the free version caps imports at 512MB unless you add an extension. It packages the database, media, themes and plugins into one file and restores them in a few clicks. It cannot read a Medium export, so it isn’t the tool for this particular move.

Will I lose my Google rankings when I leave Medium?

With proper 301 redirects from a custom domain, most sites hold 80 to 95 percent of their organic traffic and recover fully within two months. Without redirects (subdomain publishing), you’re starting the new domain’s authority close to zero, which is why the pre-launch checklist matters more than the import itself.

Ready to move your writing onto hosting you control?

We handle Medium and Ghost imports, redirect mapping and DNS cutover as part of onboarding, so your archive lands live with images local and URLs pointing where they should. Tell us how many posts you have and we’ll give you a timeline before you export anything.