Migrate from Circle to Reign.

You lose nothing if every export is on your own drive before you cancel. Circle has three exports, and each comes out as CSV. The member export comes from the admin and holds names, emails, profile fields, tags and which spaces each person can see. The community data export is requested from Circle support and holds your spaces, posts, comments and events. The Payments export holds subscription and transaction history.

The community data export does not include images or files uploaded to posts and comments. Save the ones worth keeping by hand, starting with your most read posts, and upload them again on the new site. Courses are not part of these exports, so copy lesson content across as you rebuild each course in Learnomy.

Keep the subscription and transaction files even though they cannot be imported as live billing. They tell you who was paying, on which plan, so you can invite each paying member to the right plan on your site. Circle documents each export in its help centre: community data, members and subscriptions and transactions.

The move has four phases, and only one of them is long. Exporting is quick once you have asked support for the community data file. Installing Reign and BuddyNext on staging is a short job, and the free Reign Demo Installer gives you a starting layout. Rebuilding is the long phase: its length depends on how many spaces you recreate, how many posts you copy across and whether you run courses.

The side-by-side period has no fixed length, because your members set it. Cut over when the daily posts happen on the new site, not on a date you picked in advance. Move billing last, as its own step, once people have settled.

If you would rather not do the work yourself, the Wbcom team can run the whole move and give you a timeline once they have seen your export.

Members notice three things: a new link, a new password and a new look. If you matched the space names and privacy levels, the layout will feel familiar even though the design is different. Send one email ahead of time with the new link, a plain reason for the move and a note that nothing they posted is being lost.

Brief your paying members separately. They are the ones who will be asked to do the most, because subscriptions do not move between platforms. Tell them clearly what they need to do, give them a single link, and keep billing on Circle until the community has settled.

Finally, pin a short guide in the main space of the new site. Say where the feed is, where the spaces are and how to edit a profile. Members who are shown the way in the first minute stay longer than members who have to hunt for it.

Do not close anything until the new site has its own activity. Start by inviting a small group of regulars to the new site while Circle stays live. Let them use it for a week and tell you what is confusing. Fix those things, then invite everyone.

While both run, post in both places and link between them. Move one space at a time if that suits you; start with the most active one. The aim is to make the new site the place where things happen, so that the old one quietens by itself.

Choose the cut-over by watching behaviour, not the calendar. When the new site has the daily posts and most active members have logged in, make Circle read-only and leave a pinned post pointing to the new address. If Circle ran on your custom domain, redirect the old URLs to the matching pages on the new site so links keep working.

The main gain is that the community becomes part of your website. Public posts and landing pages sit on your own domain and can be found through search. The member list lives in your database, so you can email it with any tool, and you decide the rules.

You also get one login across features. BuddyNext runs members and spaces, Jetonomy adds forums and Q&A with accepted answers, Learnomy adds courses, and MediaVerse adds photos and video, with messages working through WPMediaVerse. If you later want a member directory, a job board or a marketplace, those run on the same accounts.

On cost, Reign is a flat theme licence with no per-member fee and no share of your sales. The plugins install free and sell Pro plans separately. See the pricing page.

Members report posts and you review them from the BuddyNext moderation queue, which is in the free plugin. Jetonomy has a moderation queue for forum posts. If your community has grown to the point where one person cannot read everything, BuddyNext Pro adds auto and bulk moderation.

Map your Circle roles before you launch. Decide who can moderate, who can post in announcement spaces and who can see private spaces, then test each with a second account. Write the rules into a short code of conduct and pin it where new members arrive.

If your community is small, the hosted platform is doing its job and you do not want to run a website, staying is a sensible decision. A WordPress site needs hosting and someone to keep it updated, and that is a real responsibility. The hosting page describes what is involved.

The case for moving is ownership and reach: your own domain, pages that search engines can index, and the ability to add courses, forums or a directory on one login. If those matter to you, the move pays back. If they do not, wait until they do.