How to protect your WordPress.com account while you are alive

There is no way to name a successor on a WordPress.com account; a Site Owner can add another Administrator or transfer the site to a new owner while alive.^{1, 2}

A site transfer moves the plan, paid upgrades and domain names to the new owner. Past billing history stays with the original owner, and future transactions go to the new owner's account.²

The original owner stays on as an Administrator unless the new owner removes them, and the new owner updates the domain contact information.²

A transfer to another registrar takes five to seven days, and a domain cannot be transferred again until 60 days after it was registered or last transferred.³

The authorization code goes to the email in the domain contact details. Confirming the outgoing transfer from WordPress.com's email processes it sooner, often the same day.³

Only the site owner can transfer the site, only the plan owner can manage the plan's billing, renewal and cancellation, and only the domain owner can renew, cancel or transfer the domain.²

An Administrator cannot access purchases or stored payment details added by others, cannot delete domains they do not own, and cannot delete a site whose active plan they do not own.¹

The export file holds posts, pages, comments, categories and tags with links to the media files, not the files themselves, so the original site stays public while a new site copies the images.⁴

An export of more than about 1,000 posts or pages arrives by email as a .zip of several XML files. The export leaves out the theme, design customizations and plugins.⁴

The subscriber list downloads from Jetpack > Newsletter as a CSV of every subscriber's email address.⁵