How To Migrate From Medium To Wordpress

Moving from Medium to a self-hosted WordPress site is mostly about trading Medium's built-in audience and zero-maintenance simplicity for ownership — your own domain, your own design, and monetization options Medium doesn't allow. It's a reasonable move once you're trying to build a durable, brand-owned property rather than just get read quickly on someone else's platform. Here's how to actually do it without losing content or traffic along the way.

Export your content from Medium

Medium lets you export your published stories from your account settings — look for a data export or "download your information" option, which packages your stories and account data together. Because Medium's export tools and exact steps have changed more than once over the years, check Medium's current help documentation for the precise current path rather than relying on an old description, and don't assume the export format (HTML, Markdown, or something else) without checking what you actually receive — it affects how much manual cleanup you'll need on the WordPress side.

Set up WordPress before you import anything

Get your destination ready first: choose a host, install WordPress, and pick a theme close to what you want your final site to look like. It's much easier to import content into a working site than to import first and troubleshoot theme and plugin issues at the same time as content issues.

A few things worth setting up before import:

An SEO plugin (Yoast SEO and Rank Math are common choices) so you can manage titles, meta descriptions, and redirects as you go. A backup plugin, so you have a restore point before running any bulk import. Your permalink structure, since changing it after import means re-doing redirects for everything you just imported.

Import your content

WordPress has a native importer for various formats under Tools > Import, and dedicated Medium-to-WordPress import plugins exist as well — check current plugin reviews and compatibility before choosing one, since plugin quality and maintenance status change over time. Whichever route you use, plan to review every imported post afterward rather than assuming a clean import: formatting quirks (odd spacing, broken embeds, image sizing) are common after any cross-platform content migration and are easier to catch in a first pass than to discover one at a time after publishing.

Handle your URLs carefully — this is the step that protects your SEO

If your Medium posts have any existing search rankings, backlinks, or bookmarked traffic, the single most important technical step is making sure old URLs redirect to their new WordPress equivalents rather than simply disappearing. Concretely:

Decide on your new URL structure before you import, so you're mapping old-to-new once rather than repeatedly. Set up 301 redirects (a redirect plugin makes this manageable at scale) from each old Medium URL to its new WordPress location. If you're keeping your Medium account live at all (some people leave old posts up with a canonical link pointing to the new home, rather than deleting them outright), use Medium's canonical URL field to point back to your new WordPress post, which tells search engines the WordPress version is the authoritative one.

Skipping this step is the most common reason a migration tanks search traffic that had built up on the old platform — the content moves, but nothing tells search engines or anyone with an old bookmark where it went.

Test before you consider it done

Once content is imported, check for broken internal links (links between your own old posts, which almost never survive an export/import unchanged), broken image references, and that your redirects actually work by testing a sample of old URLs directly. Confirm your analytics and search console are set up on the new site so you can actually see whether traffic is transferring over, rather than assuming it based on the migration alone.

Give it time after launch — search engines need to recrawl and re-index your redirected URLs, which doesn't happen instantly, so don't judge whether the migration "worked" for SEO purposes in the first few days.

Deciding what to do with your Medium presence afterward

Once your content lives on WordPress, decide deliberately what happens to the Medium originals rather than leaving it as an afterthought. Three common approaches: take the Medium posts down entirely once redirects and canonical tags are in place, leave them up but set Medium's canonical field to point at your new WordPress URL (which tells search engines the WordPress version is authoritative while still letting the Medium copy exist for Medium's own internal audience), or leave them unchanged as a form of cross-posting going forward. There's no universally correct choice — it depends on whether you still want Medium's built-in distribution as a secondary channel, or whether you're moving away from the platform entirely. What matters is making the choice intentionally rather than ending up with duplicate, uncanonicalized content live in both places by default.

Don't migrate everything reflexively

Not every old Medium post necessarily deserves a spot on your new site. This is a reasonable moment to audit what you're bringing over — posts that were thin, outdated, or never performed well may be better left behind (or substantially rewritten before they're worth republishing) rather than imported as-is simply because they existed. A smaller, stronger WordPress site built from your best Medium content, with real editorial judgment applied, is usually a better foundation than an automated one-to-one transfer of everything regardless of quality.

Plan for a temporary dip, not a guaranteed one

Some migrations see a temporary dip in search visibility even when redirects are handled correctly, simply because search engines need time to process the change and re-establish confidence in the new URLs. This isn't universal and isn't a sign something went wrong on its own — but it's worth expecting rather than being alarmed by, and it's exactly why testing redirects carefully and monitoring Search Console closely in the weeks after launch matters more than judging success from the first few days of data.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will I lose my Medium followers when I migrate? Your Medium follower relationship stays on Medium regardless of what you do with your content there, since that's a platform-native relationship rather than something exportable. If you want to retain that audience, keeping some presence on Medium (even just cross-posted content with a canonical link back) rather than deleting your account entirely is worth considering.

Do I need to migrate everything at once, or can I do it gradually? A gradual migration is entirely workable, and can even be safer — moving your highest-value or best-performing content first, confirming redirects and rankings hold up, then continuing with the rest, rather than moving everything simultaneously and troubleshooting a large batch of issues at once.

What happens to comments on my old Medium posts? This depends on your migration tool and generally requires the most manual attention of any content type, since comment migration isn't always well supported. Check what your specific import tool handles before assuming comments will transfer, and have a plan (even just archiving them separately) if they don't.

Is it worth hiring someone to handle this migration instead of doing it myself? For a small number of posts, a manual or plugin-assisted DIY migration is usually manageable. For a large archive, or if getting redirects and SEO continuity exactly right matters a great deal to your traffic, the technical risk of getting URL handling wrong may justify paying someone experienced with WordPress migrations specifically, rather than treating it as a purely mechanical export-import task.