Planning ahead for your WordPress.com accounts
Lifetime transfer options and steps to take now for Automattic accounts
WordPress.com Support (Happiness Engineers)
Automattic offers a process for transferring WordPress.com accounts after death. Lifetime planning provides additional options for how accounts are used and who has access to them.
How to protect your WordPress.com accounts
Here are 5 steps to protect and manage your WordPress.com accounts while the account is active:
- •Administrators can manage all site content, users, themes, plugins, imports/exports, and settings
- •Non-owner Administrators cannot access purchases or payment details added by the Site Owner, cannot transfer site ownership, and cannot delete domains they do not own
- •For full control including billing, use Transfer site instead
- •Go to wordpress.com/sites, open the site, and click the Settings tab in the hosting dashboard
- •Scroll to the Danger zone and click Transfer
- •Enter the new owner's WordPress.com username or email and click Continue
- •Authorize the transfer from the email link; the new owner confirms acceptance
- •All paid plans and registered domains transfer; future billing moves to the new owner
- •Per ICANN rules, the new owner must update domain contact information from the previous owner's details
- •The original owner stays on as an Administrator unless the new owner removes them
- •Export site content as XML (posts, pages, comments, categories, tags); note this includes media references but not actual media files
- •Separately download the media library (images, audio, videos, documents)
- •Export newsletter subscriber lists as CSV from the Subscribers panel
- •Export WooCommerce orders and customer data if running an online store
- •Unlock the domain and request an EPP/auth code from the Domains dashboard
- •Provide the code to the receiving registrar (transfers take 5-7 days; same-day expedited available)
- •A 60-day lock applies after registration or a prior transfer
- •WordPress.com enables free WHOIS privacy by default; the receiving registrar may require disabling it
Family sharing
WordPress.com supports transferring full site ownership (including paid plans and registered domains) to another WordPress.com account. The original owner remains as an Administrator after transfer unless the new owner removes them. Adding someone as a site Administrator gives them broad access to content, users, settings, themes, plugins, and imports/exports. However, non-owner Administrators cannot access purchases or payment details added by the Site Owner, cannot transfer site ownership, cannot delete domains they do not own, and cannot delete the site if the active plan is owned by someone else. For full access including billing, the Site Owner must use Transfer site.
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
Listing the WordPress.com account in an estate inventory identifies it for a fiduciary, who works through the operator's official channels to manage or close it.
WordPress.com does not offer beneficiary designations, so there is no program-level mechanism for directing accounts to a specific person at death.
Sources
Data sourced from Automattic primary sources (9 pages reviewed). How we research.
WordPress.com Support (Happiness Engineers)
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