How to Move Your Blog From Medium to Your Own Website Without Losing Rankings

Every article you publish on Medium strengthens medium.com in Google, not you. The claps, the followers and the search traffic all accrue to a domain you do not own, and that only becomes obvious once you have a website of your own worth pointing that traffic at.

The good news: you can move your blog from Medium to your own website in an afternoon. The honest news: how much ranking you keep depends on one detail, whether your Medium posts lived on a custom domain or on medium.com itself. This guide covers both cases, in the order you should do the work.

The audience you built on Medium is portable. The search authority is not, unless you move it deliberately.

What you can and cannot carry over

Two technical tools normally protect rankings during a migration. A 301 redirect tells Google a page has permanently moved. A canonical tag, the signal that tells Google which version of a duplicated page is the real one, lets two copies coexist while only one ranks.

On Medium, your access to both depends on where your posts live:

• Posts on medium.com or yourname.medium.com: you cannot add redirects and you cannot point a canonical tag at your new site. Medium controls those pages.
• Posts on a custom domain you connected to Medium: you own the domain, so once you move it away from Medium you can set up proper 301 redirects and keep almost everything.

If you are in the first group, some ranking loss is likely in the short term, because Google treats your republished posts as new pages on your domain rather than moved pages. The steps below minimise that loss and make sure every future post compounds on a domain you control. Pretending otherwise would be selling you a fantasy.

Step 1: Export your posts from Medium

Medium lets you download everything you have written in one go.

1. Open Medium and go to Settings, then the Security and apps section.
2. Choose the option to download your information.
3. Wait for the email, then download the zip file. It contains every post and draft as an HTML file.

One caveat: your images are still hosted on Medium's servers, and the export references them there. Save each image locally as you go, because you will re-upload them to your own site in the next step. If a Medium post is ever deleted, images that still point at Medium's servers can break.

Step 2: Republish the posts on your own domain

Put the blog on your main domain, ideally at yoursite.com/blog rather than a separate subdomain, so the authority the posts earn feeds the pages you sell from. If your platform forces the choice, the trade-offs are covered in blog subdomain vs subdirectory.

For each post:

• Create a clean URL based on the title, such as /blog/how-we-priced-our-first-product. Do not copy Medium's long hashed URLs.
• Paste in the content and tidy the formatting. Medium's export includes its own markup that rarely transfers cleanly.
• Upload the images to your own site and replace the Medium-hosted versions.
• Set the original publish date if your platform allows it, so thirty posts do not all appear to have been written yesterday.
• Add two or three internal links from each post to your service or product pages, something Medium never let you do properly.

This is the slowest part of the afternoon. If you have more than about twenty posts, consider moving your ten best performers first and drip-feeding the rest over a week or two.

Step 3: Decide what happens to the Medium originals

You now have two copies of every post, and Google will notice. Since you cannot set a canonical tag on Medium pointing to your site, you have three options, in descending order of preference:

1. Delete the Medium versions. Cleanest outcome. The Medium pages return a 404, drop out of Google over the following weeks, and your versions become the only copy. You lose Medium's internal traffic to those posts.
2. Replace each Medium post with a short summary and a link. Keep the first paragraph, then add a line saying the full article now lives on your site, with a link. You keep some Medium referral traffic while removing the duplicate.
3. Leave them as they are. The worst option. Medium's copies will usually outrank yours because medium.com carries more authority than most small business domains, and you will be competing with yourself indefinitely.

Step 4: Tell Google you have moved your blog from Medium to your own website

Republishing is not enough on its own; small sites sit low in Google's crawling priorities, so give it a push.

1. Verify your site in Google Search Console if you have not already.
2. Submit your sitemap, which most platforms generate automatically at /sitemap.xml.
3. Use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for each republished post, starting with your best performers.

Indexing a batch of new pages on a small site can take days rather than hours. The full set of techniques for speeding it up is in how to get new blog posts indexed by Google faster.

If your Medium publication used a custom domain

You are in a much stronger position. Because the domain is yours, you can rebuild the blog on that same domain, keep the same URL paths where possible, and set 301 redirects for any URLs that change. Google follows the redirects, transfers most of the ranking signals, and your positions usually survive largely intact.

The one trap: match the old URL structure carefully. List your indexed Medium URLs from Search Console or a site: search, and map each one to its new home before you switch the domain over. A missed redirect is a lost ranking.

What to expect afterwards

If you moved from medium.com, expect some posts to rank lower for a while, particularly for competitive terms where Medium's domain authority was doing the heavy lifting. Posts targeting specific, low-competition questions tend to recover fastest. The compensation is permanent: every post you publish from now on builds your domain, links to your own pages, and can carry calls to action Medium never allowed.

Treat the move as the start of a publishing habit, not the end of a chore. A domain that keeps receiving fresh, relevant articles gets crawled more often and recovers faster than one that goes quiet after the migration.

Where Helio SEO fits in

Helio SEO publishes one SEO article a day to your own domain, including a hosted blog set up via a single DNS record if your site has no blogging platform, which suits founders leaving Medium precisely because they want the authority accruing to their own site. The setup takes about five minutes. The migration itself, though, is a one-off job you can do yourself with the steps above, and you do not need us for it.