WordPress.com lets you ditch Medium with new import tool

Publishing platform Medium recently laid off dozens of people. So if you don’t want to hand away your precious writing to a startup that is still looking for its business model, you can move your content to WordPress.com in just a few clicks.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, just launched a new importing tool that makes it easier to copy all your Medium content to a WordPress.com site.

Medium has been a good citizen as it lets you export your posts and drafts as a convenient .zip archive file in your Medium settings. You can then head over the import page in your WordPress.com settings and upload this .zip file.

After the upload is done, it takes 15 minutes to publish all your posts with the correct timestamps and convert your Medium drafts to WordPress drafts. But that’s about it.

Medium has a sleek interface and some great distribution tools. It’s easy to get a ton of readers if you already have a lot of followers on Twitter for instance.

But Medium also wants to become the definitive proprietary platform for text content. The company can run ads against your posts and literally do whatever they want with your articles. WordPress.com has had a more open approach over the years with a clear business model, and I’d personally trust WordPress.com over Medium.

Even if you want to stay on Medium, it’s good to know that there are easy tools to migrate your website to other platforms. So if you don’t agree with Medium’s decisions, you’ll always have the option to move away from it.

Update: Medium no longer runs promoted stories and is now looking for a new revenue stream.