Move Your Blog from Wordpress to Kajabi in 8 Easy Steps

With the rise in popularity of the online platform Kajabi, many people - including me - are moving their entire Wordpress blog sites over to Kajabi. It may sound like an intimidating process but I'm here to make it as simple as possible.

No Worries, #KajabiErika Is Holding Your Hand

Not only was I a Kajabi Virtual Assistant heavily using the platform for 2+ years, but I'm also a Kajabi Ambassador, 1 of 7 people worldwide chosen to share Kajabi and assist its amazing customers. So you're in great hands! Just follow my 8 easy steps for moving your blog from Wordpress to Kajabi!

What's This Kajabi You Speak Of?

I'll explain a little more about Kajabi, in case it's new to you. Kajabi is an all-in-one platform for running your online business. Instead of piecing together, say, a Wordpress site + an email marketing system + a courses or membership plugin + a webinar service + a funnel-building service ... Kajabi does all of that under one roof. Thus, it saves you aggravation, time, and money. 

If Kajabi sounds intriguing, please check out a free 30-day trial using my Partner (aka affiliate) link. You COULD also sign up straight from the Kajabi home page but if you use my Partner link, you'll get a 30-day trial instead of 14 days :)

Let's Move Your Blog from WordPress to Kajabi

Okay, so you've fallen in love with Kajabi and decided to dump all these other systems and consolidate everything in one place. But if you close down your WordPress site, what happens to all those blog posts you published? You're going to move them over to Kajabi!

Please be aware that moving your posts from WordPress to Kajabi will give the posts URLs that don't match your WP ones and, therefore, any SEO (search engine optimization aka Google juice) you've built up will be lost. So check the Custom URL under the SEO and Sharing section when you do Kajabi blog posts. Besides, Kajabians report that, with Kajabi's SEO settings for each blog post along with good content, they're able to rebuild SEO to what it was on WordPress ... or even improve on it!

Note: You can do redirects but I chose not to, so that's something you can research if you're interested.

Because WordPress and Kajabi are COMPLETELY different platforms, it's impossible to just "port over" your blog posts from one to the other. However, it's an easy process to manually move your blog posts from WordPress to Kajabi. I just completed this conversion process for myself so I know exactly what to do.

8 Easy Steps for Moving Your WordPress Blog to Kajabi

1. Create a front page directing people to your new blog URL

Although you're moving your WordPress blog to Kajabi, the "old" site may remain live until you grab everything you need before it disappears, cancel the hosting, and shut it down completely. In the meantime, you'll want to show a static page as your front page that directs people to your new Kajabi blog. Here are instructions from Wordpress on how to do that. 

2. Look at your WordPress stats

I wasn't using Google Analytics for the blog site I was moving so I just used the stats in Jetpack. I took screenshots of the most popular posts for last 3 months, last year, and all time. I also screen shot the main Site Stats view set to Months so I could capture a big chunk of my recent traffic and also see what months were most trafficked over the last year (this part was more fyi or "for posterity's sake" than anything). Finally, I went to my All Posts page, sorted in order of most comments, and got screen shots to capture the posts with the most comments.

If you have Google Analytics for the blog you're moving, you should check those instead. They tend to be more accurate than your Jetpack stats.

3. Use the stats to guide which posts you'll move to Kajabi

You can decide this for yourself - what makes a post "worth" moving. I decided that if a post had no comments or very low views, it obviously wasn't an engaging or timely post. Therefore, there was no need to move it. I'd rather write fresh content that will perform better on my new Kajabi site. We all get better at this blogging thing as we go, right? So I only had 54 total posts to consider. You may have a lot more than that - in which case having those stats to help guide you will be REALLY helpful. 

4. Find the evergreen posts

Many of my posts were time-specific (about online events, newly-released books or courses, etc.). I saw no reason to move those. Other posts were about VA services I no longer offer so most of those I deleted. However, in a few cases, the information was still valuable so I transferred the post. Other posts were 90%+ evergreen and worth moving from Wordpress to Kajabi. Interestingly, many of these posts were also the ones with the highest stats and the most comments :) Coincidence? I think not. :D

5. Make published posts into Drafts (or delete them)

As you go through each WordPress blog post, decide what you're going to do with it (i.e., don't waste time by coming back to it later; decide then and there). Whether you copy/paste it over to Kajabi or not, either delete the post or convert it to Draft mode so it's "unpublished". 

*If it's a post you're transferring, it may be worth checking your backlinks and notifying the site owner(s) to request that they update the URL to your new post on Kajabi (if it changed).

Like I said, you can choose to delete your Wordpress blog posts or unpublish and put them in Draft mode. I chose the latter, mostly because I'm a "just in case" person. You know, "Just in case I need to refer back to that for some crazy reason," ha! If you delete the posts, do make note of the original publish date of posts you're moving to Kajabi (see Step 7).

6. Add text to your 404 page

From here on out, when/if anyone comes across an old blog post link (if you didn't retain the URL on your new Kajabi blog), it's now in Draft mode and will go to your 404 page. Instead of completely losing the reader at that point - someone who was interested in you or your content - add something to your 404 page that directs them to your new blog on Kajabi along with a link to that URL. Let's make it as easy as possible for them to visit your new digs.

To illustrate one reason I'm switching from WordPress to Kajabi in the first place, lol ... I looked up instructions for how to edit the text on the my 404 page and it was so flippin' complicated, I wanted to cry. {In Kajabi, it's dead easy}. I did find a plugin to do the job so give that a try if you're not super-techy Wordpress-savvy.

7. Create new posts in Kajabi

Start a new blog post in Kajabi (instructions here). You can re-use the same title or create a fresh one; it's up to you. I kept most of my original titles but a few I re-worded based on things I've learned about key words, SEO, etc. since I titled the original post. "When you know better, you do better!" 

To make this initial process go more quickly, I just saved the posts as Drafts in Kajabi, to be finalized later on. In the title box, I included in parenthesis the date it was originally published on my Wordpress blog. In the next step, you can decide if you want to keep the old date or publish it as a new post; I mostly chose to retain the old date. In Step 8, I was glad I had the original publish date in parenthesis right in Kajabi so I didn't have to keep flipping back to WordPress for it. In case you're wondering, yes, Kajabi does let you backdate blog posts (instructions).

Back in WordPress, view the old post in Text mode and copy/paste the whole thing over to Kajabi. In the Kajabi blog post box, click on the "<>" symbol and paste the old post in there. Then it retains your links and formatting (bullets, bolding, etc).

All images that were housed in your media library will need to be downloaded from Wordpress (or find them on your computer/Drive/Dropbox etc. if you kept a copy) and uploaded into the Kajabi blog post. 

Alternatively, perhaps this is a good time to refresh the post with better images. Unless your Wordpress post is quite recent, I'd venture to say you could improve on the images you used :)

*Need fresh photos for your new Kajabi blog? Check out this cool post: 30+ Free Photo Sites for Creative Solopreneurs." All of the photos are royalty free, copyright free, attribution free, and FREE! Use them to your heart's content in your blog posts or anywhere you like!

Don't edit or finalize your new blog posts in Kajabi at this point. For now, just start the post, copy/paste over the title, original publish date, the body of the post, and save it as Unpublished. It'll move much faster if you just update all your transferred posts at once in the next step.

8. Finalize your "new" posts in Kajabi

For all the posts you moved over from WordPress, you now have a draft in Kajabi to work from. You can do edits, updates, upload images, add Blog Image, Tags, and fill in the SEO and Sharing section. 

When your post is ready to go, you can set the publishing date - including backdating, change Unpublished to Published, and click Save. BOOM! You're done.

Photos courtesy of Bzak on Pixabay

See? That Wasn't So Bad

As you can gather, this is not a difficult process just a somewhat tedious one. Once I finally decided to move my blog from WordPress to Kajabi, I just wanted to get it over with.

Luckily for me, it's World Series time so I just worked on my "blog move" project during the games. That way I didn't get too bored :) You could do yours while binge-watching a Netflix series. I suggest you do something fun so that you speed through it in less than a week and don't leave it hanging.

It feels very good to have this project DONE! It's sad to let go of my old WordPress site; it served me well at an earlier stage of my business. But now that I've moved on to the mega-capabilities of Kajabi and all it offers, I'm so happy to have a pretty, clean, and refreshed new blog on my Kajabi site.

xo,