Migrate From Mighty Networks to Your Own WordPress Site

You can move a Mighty Networks community to your own WordPress site, but no importer does it for you. The real path has five parts: export the member lists Mighty Networks gives you, build the new site on staging, invite people by CSV, rebuild the spaces and plans you want, and run both side by side until your regulars have moved.

This guide walks through that path with BuddyNext, a WordPress community plugin. We build it, so read the “should you move at all” section with that in mind. We’ve tried to be fair to Mighty Networks there, because it does several things well.

Our team can move your Mighty Networks community to your own WordPress site for you, through the Mighty Networks API. Members, spaces, posts, events, courses, media and plans come across; direct messages cannot, because Mighty Networks has no API for them. If you would rather do it yourself, the export, invite and rebuild route is covered below.

This guide covers both. It is written by the team behind BuddyNext, a WordPress community plugin, so read the “should you move at all” section with that in mind. We have tried to be fair to Mighty Networks there, because it does several things well. The landing page for the service is Mighty Networks migration.

How does the team migration work?

It is a done-for-you service from the Wbcom team. You hand over a Mighty Networks API key, which you generate in your Mighty admin, your network id, and access to the WordPress site the community is moving to. We do the rest.

The work runs in order:

1. Census. A read-only count of members, spaces, posts, events, courses and plans, so the job is sized before anything moves.
2. Structure map. Which Mighty spaces become which BuddyNext spaces, and which plan opens what. You approve it before anything is imported.
3. Foundation on staging. Spaces, membership plans, courses and the events calendar are created on a staging copy of your site.
4. Staged import. Members first, then spaces, posts, polls, events, RSVPs, courses, comments, reactions and answers. Each stage can be re-run without making duplicates.
5. Cleanup and repair. Formatting is cleaned, old Mighty links are rewritten, media is placed and event dates and time zones are checked.
6. Verification. We sign in as a real member, with a plan and without one, and check the feed, an event, a course and access.
7. Cutover. A catch-up pull brings across anything posted during the move, and email and name changes are synced.

Members are matched by the email they used on Mighty Networks, so their profile, spaces and courses are waiting when they sign in.

What moves through the API

• Members with their profile fields and the answers they gave, avatars, badges and tags.
• Spaces and space members, which become BuddyNext spaces.
• Posts, polls, comments, reactions and answers, with formatting cleaned and old Mighty links rewritten.
• Events and RSVPs, onto Eventonomy.
• Courses with lessons, including lesson videos and links, onto Learnomy.
• Images and documents linked from posts and lessons, downloaded into the site’s media library through WPMediaVerse.
• Plans and who is on them. Members are seated on the matching membership plan from your payment records at cutover, which opens their spaces and enrols them in the plan’s courses.

What does not move

• Direct messages. Mighty Networks has no API for them. This is Mighty’s limit, not ours, so members start new conversations on the new site.
• Mighty-hosted native videos. They stay as links unless you ask for them to be moved.
• Files that nothing links to. Documents are found by reading posts and lessons, so a file sitting in the Files tab with no link is pulled separately once known.
• Plan prices. Mighty does not report them reliably, so you confirm the price and billing period of every plan.

Access is seated from your payment records. That is not the same as existing Mighty subscriptions carrying on billing by themselves, so how renewals bill is agreed with you before cutover.

To start, tell us about your community on the contact page: roughly how many members, spaces and courses, and whether members pay.

What carries over, by route

The word “lose” needs care. Nothing you do on the new site deletes your Mighty network. It stays exactly where it is until you decide to close it. What you can lose is people, if you move badly, so keep both running while your regulars switch.

BuddyNext does have a free importer. It reads BuddyPress and BuddyBoss communities straight from the database, and it does not read Mighty Networks. Our migration hub covers those paths. Mighty Networks is the platform our team moves through its API.

Should you move off Mighty Networks at all?

Check this first, because a move costs real effort. Mighty Networks wins on several things.

• It runs itself. There are no servers, no plugins and no updates. Mighty runs the whole stack, and the product is polished out of the box.
• It’s all in one. Community, courses, events and payments are native and woven together, with AI-assisted setup that helps a solo creator stand up a paid community fast.
• A faster start. For a non-technical creator, you can sign up, brand it, build a course and a paywall, and be selling the same week.
• Its own branded app. Mighty offers a native iOS and Android app on its top tier, refined over years. BuddyNext has an installable web app today, and native apps are in development with no date.

What moving buys you is ownership. Your members and posts sit in your own WordPress database. BuddyNext takes no cut of what you charge, so the only fee on a sale is your payment processor’s. Mighty Networks lists a platform fee on its plans on top of Stripe’s, so read your own plan on mightynetworks.com before you decide. You also get public pages on your own domain, a free REST API and the whole WordPress ecosystem.

If your community is happy in one hosted place and you never want to touch a server, it may be better off staying. If you keep hitting the walls of a closed product, or the fees feel heavy, read on. Our BuddyNext vs Mighty Networks comparison goes through the trade in detail, and the alternative page lists the field.

The do-it-yourself route

Everything from here to the launch checklist is the alternative to the team migration: you export, invite and rebuild yourself. It works, it costs no service fee, and it takes more of your time. The facts below are for that route.

Step 1: What can you export from Mighty Networks?

Do this before you touch the new site, and do it while you’re still on the plan you pay for today.

Mighty Networks’ own help pages (checked in October 2026) say a host on the Launch plan or higher can download member data as an Excel file. The request is made from the admin area, under Members and then Member List. Mighty emails you a link, and you agree to terms that prohibit selling or sharing member data. Read them. Use the list to invite your own members to your own new home and nothing more.

Mighty’s pages are the source of truth, and they change. Check which plan you’re on and what your plan includes before you plan anything. Then open the file. Count the rows. Look for an email column.

Your checklist:

• The full member list. It’s a wide spreadsheet with names, email addresses, join dates, last visit, which Spaces each person belongs to, tags and custom field answers.
• One list per Space. A Space host who is also a network host can download a Space’s own list from its settings. That helps when you want to rebuild a private cohort exactly.
• One list per paid Plan. If you charge, each Plan has its own list with payment status and billing interval. This is the sheet you’ll lean on to look after paying members.
• Screening question answers. Where a Plan or Space asks questions before people join, the answers come out on a second tab. Keep them. They tell you who each person is.
• Your lesson files. Download the original videos, documents and images you uploaded. Keep your own source files, not links to them on Mighty.
• The posts you can’t lose. Copy pinned posts, rules, announcements people still link to and the best answers into a document by hand.
• Promises you’ve made. Note any perks, founding rates or live-event dates, so the new site honours them.

Do not assume Mighty exports your posts, comments or course lessons. Its help pages describe member lists. Treat everything else as not exported until you prove otherwise on your own network. If a support request gets you more than the lists, keep that too.

What if the export has no emails?

An email you hold yourself is the only contact route that survives the move. If your file doesn’t have them, collect them inside Mighty before anything else.

• Pin a post that says you’re building a new home and asks for an email address in the replies or through a simple form on your own site.
• Add an email question to the screening questions for new joiners.
• Message your most active members directly and ask.

Some people will never reply. That’s normal. You’re looking for your regulars first.

Step 2: Build the new site on staging

Don’t build on your live site. Use a staging copy, or a fresh WordPress install.

You’ll need WordPress 6.9 or newer, PHP 8.1 or newer, MySQL 5.7 or MariaDB 10.3, and pretty permalinks turned on. A PHP memory limit of 512 MB is recommended once the full family of plugins is active. Install the free BuddyNext plugin and activate it. It creates the community pages and prepares its storage by itself, and there’s no licence key for the free version.

If you charge for access, install BuddyNext Pro on top. The Pro licence key gates updates only. It never locks features.

This is the biggest difference from Mighty Networks, so be honest with yourself about it. You now own the hosting, the backups and the updates. Pick a host you trust, take a tested backup before you invite anyone, and decide who will watch the site. Our self-hosted community platform guide lays out what that work really is.

Then set three things before you invite anyone:

1. Registration mode. If your network is paid or private, choose Invite Only, so the invitations you send are the only way in. Otherwise Open is fine.
2. Email. Send a test invitation to yourself and check it lands in the inbox, not spam. Use a proper mail-sending service.
3. Branding. The sign-up form picks up your site’s colours and fonts, and you can set the heading and tagline to say what the community is.

Step 3: Rebuild your Spaces

This is where moving pays off. On Mighty Networks you have Spaces. BuddyNext has spaces too, and each has its own feed, members, rules and moderators.

Map the pieces like this.

• Each Mighty Space you keep becomes a space. Decide first which ones you’re moving, merging or retiring. Most communities retire more than they expect.
• Visibility is a choice per space. Open, Private or Secret. A secret space stays out of search and out of the directory.
• Paid Plans become membership plans. In BuddyNext Pro, a plan can open one space or several, and several plans can open the same space.
• Sub-spaces go two levels deep. A region can hold its own towns, for example.
• Discussions. Jetonomy, a separate forum plugin from the same team, can give a space a Discussions tab for answers that stay findable. The bridge is free.
• Members. Member types label cohorts, and the directory sorts by newest, alphabetical, most active or online.

More structure means more decisions. Start small. A welcome space, one or two topic spaces and a paid room is enough for launch. You can add more later.

Rebuild only the posts that matter. You won’t republish three years of posts, and you shouldn’t try. Choose the evergreen ones: the welcome guide, the rules, the best answers and the course notes. Post them as announcements or discussion threads and link to them from your welcome message. A new community doesn’t need endless scrollback to feel alive, and a fresh start is often the reason people move.

Set your Welcome space to auto-join new members, so it’s full from the first minute. You can also limit auto-join to chosen member types.

Step 4: Set up paid plans with BuddyNext Pro

If your network charges, this step needs the most care. Membership plans are a BuddyNext Pro feature, and, on the do-it-yourself route, BuddyNext has no tool that takes over subscriptions created on another platform. With the team migration, members are seated on the matching plan from your payment records instead.

A plan has a price, a billing schedule and an optional trial. It can be one-time, monthly or yearly. You define it once, and that single definition drives the pricing page, the access checks and your reports. Then attach each plan to the spaces it opens.

For payment, connect Stripe or PayPal. Coupons are available, which is handy for a founding-member discount for people who move early. The pricing page is an ordinary WordPress page, so you can edit it in the block editor. For the licence options, see our pricing page.

You can create plans and grant access by hand before any gateway is connected. That’s a safe way to run a handful of founding members through the system while you decide what to charge.

Test the whole flow as a stranger, not as the admin. Use a second browser and a fresh email address. Sign up, subscribe with a test coupon or sandbox payment, confirm the gated space opens, then cancel and confirm access closes cleanly. Do it on a phone too.

Step 5: Rebuild courses and events

These are the two Mighty features people miss most, because on Mighty they’re built in. On WordPress they’re separate plugins from our team, and that’s more setup. In return, you aren’t tied to one platform’s course tooling.

Courses. Learnomy is a separate course plugin from the same team. Install it, create your courses and re-upload your own lesson files. The bridge between Learnomy and BuddyNext is in BuddyNext Pro. It posts course completions and certificates to the feed, can link a course to a space so learners are added when they enrol, and can enrol a member in a course when they buy a plan. You need Learnomy and BuddyNext Pro both active. Another LMS can run on the same site, but BuddyNext ships no bridge for it.

Events. Eventonomy is the events plugin, and its bridge is in BuddyNext Pro. It puts published events and attending cards into the feed. Recreate your upcoming events there rather than trying to carry old ones across.

If your Mighty network is mostly a community with a few lessons, you may find you don’t need either on day one. Launch the community, then add courses once members have settled in.

Some things will feel different from Mighty Networks, and you should plan for them. There’s no AI-assisted setup wizard. Suggested spaces and following people exist, but pairing members is something an organiser does. The native branded app is not a switch you turn on: BuddyNext can be installed as an app from the browser, and the native apps are a separate matter still in development.

Step 6: Invite your members by CSV

Now the part that matters most. Invitations are in the free plugin and live under BuddyNext, Members, Directory, Invites.

For a list, prepare a CSV where each line is either email or email,first_name. Pull the columns from your Mighty export. Choose Send bulk invitations, pick the file and send.

A few rules keep a bulk send sensible:

• Up to 500 rows are processed per upload. Split a bigger list into batches.
• An address that already has a pending invite is skipped, so re-uploading a longer list never double-invites anyone.
• The link is tied to the email address and can’t be reused for another one.
• Invitations expire after 7 days by default. You can resend to issue a fresh one, or revoke one.
• The Invites tab shows each invitation’s status: Pending, Accepted, Expired or Bounced.

When people click, the sign-up form already has their email filled in. They choose a password and they’re in. You can edit the invitation email under Notifications, Email Templates, so it sounds like you.

Send in waves. First a small group of your most active members, then ask them to break things: sign up, post, react, open a gated space, all on a phone. Fix what they find. Then invite the rest in batches, so the first week is calm and your email service doesn’t throttle the mail.

Two more ways in

A CSV needs emails. For people you can’t email, there are other routes.

• Space invite links. A space owner or moderator can create a shareable link that expires after a day, a week, a month or never, and can cap how many people may use it. It suits a pinned post inside your Mighty network. A link can be revoked without issuing a new one.
• Auto-join. New members can land in your welcome space and in any space you choose at sign-up.

A link doesn’t skip your rules. New people still complete sign-up and any verification, and paid spaces still need the plan.

Members also get a short onboarding wizard after they register, where they fill in a profile, pick interests, join spaces and follow people. It runs by itself.

Step 7: Announce the move and run both side by side

The announcement decides how many people come along. Keep it simple.

1. Pick a date when Mighty stops being the place for conversation.
2. Post it on Mighty, pinned, with the new link, the date and a plain reason to join. Repeat it in your emails.
3. Overlap for a few weeks. Post anything new in both places, but answer questions only in the new one, so people learn where the conversation is.
4. Run live events in one place only, and say which. Splitting a live session across two platforms halves the room.
5. Keep Mighty open until the move is done. Before you cancel or change a plan, find out in your plan settings what that does to your Spaces and your member list, and finish every export while the old network is still fully open to you.
6. Wind it down to read-only, or cancel, only once your regulars are posting in the new place.

On the do-it-yourself route, paying members move last. Each payer subscribes again, so agree the end date of the old billing with each person. If someone has already paid for a stretch on Mighty, the Add order form on the Pro Billing screen records a payment that arrived elsewhere, and their access follows the plan you assign. That way nobody is charged twice. A founding discount for people who move across is simply a coupon you create yourself.

What will this cost me to run?

Fee comparisons age badly, so this page quotes none. Do your own sums with your own figures.

Take your recent invoices from Mighty Networks and add any per-sale charges. Write the total beside what you’d pay for hosting, the BuddyNext Pro licence you actually need and a payment processor. The processor charges you on either side of the move. The difference is yours to judge, and it should include the time you’ll spend running a site.

Here’s a made-up example of how to lay it out, with invented numbers so you can see the shape. Say your Mighty bill and per-sale charges came to 100 units last month. On WordPress you’d list hosting at 30 units, a share of the Pro licence at 15 and a backup service at 5. That is 50 units, plus your own hours. Your real figures will differ, so use your own.

Also count what you can’t price: owning the member list, choosing your own plugins and not having a vendor change the terms underneath you. If a hosted platform’s convenience is worth more than that to you, staying is a fair decision. Our guide to platforms with no transaction fees goes further on the fee side.

A realistic timeline

Every community is different, so treat this as a shape, not a promise.

If you rebuild a large course library, add time. Video-heavy courses take longest, because you re-upload the files.

A launch checklist

• Members exported, and the file opened and checked for emails.
• Lesson files saved from your own source, not from Mighty.
• The new site runs on staging, then live, with a tested backup.
• Registration mode, email delivery and terms page are set.
• Spaces exist, with the right privacy type on each.
• Plans exist and a test purchase works end to end.
• Courses and events are rebuilt, or you’ve decided to launch without them.
• A first CSV batch has gone out and been tested on a phone.
• The announcement is written, dated and pinned.
• Someone owns moderation on the new site.

What you’ll miss, and how to cope

Be honest about the losses so they don’t surprise you. You’ll give up Mighty’s all-in-one polish, its AI-assisted setup and, if you use it, its branded native app. You’ll also take on the upkeep. Updates, backups and email delivery are yours or your host’s.

In return, nobody can change the terms underneath your community. Your community sits on your own site, and you can change hosts, add plugins or rebuild the front end whenever you want. Your members will need a reason to come, though: a better home, not just a different one. Say plainly in your announcement what they get.

Where to go from here

Click through the real screens first. The live demo runs a seeded BuddyNext community with owner access for four hours and asks for an email. The Mighty Networks alternative page has the feature comparison, and the free vs Pro page shows which tier each step above needs.