Moving a Skool community to WordPress

Moving a community off Skool is a four-week job if you plan it and a three-month mess if you do not. The plan: export your member list from Skool, rebuild your spaces and courses in WordPress, invite members with a one-click link so nobody has to create a password, and run both for 30 days with new posts going to WordPress only. Old posts and comments have no bulk export, so keep the twenty threads that still get read as pages and let the rest go. Paid members re-subscribe through your own Stripe with a thank-you discount, because subscriptions cannot be transferred between platforms. Here is what you can take, what you cannot, and the week-by-week plan.

Why people move

Three reasons come up every time. The monthly fee, which at Skool’s published price is around $99 a community at the time of writing, plus payment processing on top, and it does not get cheaper as you grow. The discovery feed, which puts your competitors one click from your members. And ownership: your members’ emails, your courses and your posts live on a platform that can change its rules, its prices or its ranking tomorrow. None of these is a reason to move a community that is growing happily. All three are reasons to move one that pays you.

What you can take with you, and what you cannot

• Members: yes. Skool lets you export the member list as a CSV with names and emails. This is the only asset that matters, and it is enough.
• Courses: rebuild them. There is no course export. Your videos are already hosted elsewhere (YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, Wistia), so a course is a list of lessons with embeds and text. Budget an hour per module to rebuild.
• Posts and comments: no bulk export. At the time of writing you cannot download the feed. You can copy individual threads by hand. This feels like a loss and mostly is not; see below.
• Payments: cannot transfer. Subscriptions on Skool are billed through Skool. Members must subscribe again on your site. This is the only part of the migration that touches revenue, so it gets its own section.
• Leaderboards, points, levels: start over. Announce it as a reset; most members like a fresh start more than you expect.

Decide what content survives

Open Skool’s feed and sort by what still gets views and comments. In almost every community it is a short list: the welcome post, the rules, a handful of threads that became the canonical answer to a recurring question, a few resource dumps. Twenty threads, sometimes thirty. Copy those into WordPress as pages or pinned posts, credited to the original author, and link them from the new welcome post. Everything else is a stream, and streams are not where the value of a community lives. The value is the people, and you have their emails.

The 30-day plan

Week 1: build the empty house

1. Install the community plugin on your own WordPress site (a subdomain like community.yourdomain.com or a section of the main site; one site, one login).
2. Create your spaces to mirror Skool’s categories, plus one called Start here.
3. Rebuild the courses: modules, lessons, embeds, downloads. Set which ones are free and which are tier-gated.
4. Set up tiers and pricing in Stripe through the plugin: the same price as Skool, or a slightly lower founding-member price for the migration window.
5. Write the welcome post, the rules, and the “why we moved” post. The last one matters: members join people, not platforms, and they want to hear the reason from you.

Week 2: bring the people over

1. Import the member CSV. Every member gets an account with their name and email and no password.
2. Send one-click invitation links by email: the member taps the link and is logged in, with a prompt to set a password later. Removing the “create an account” step is the single biggest factor in how many people make it across; expect 60 to 80 percent of active members in the first week with invitation links, and half that with a signup form.
3. Post the same announcement in Skool, pinned, with the link. Repeat it three times over the month; people miss things.
4. Seed the new feed with three or four real conversations before the invitations go out. Nobody posts first in an empty room.

Week 3: move the money

1. Email paid members individually or in a small batch: the new tier page, the thank-you discount, and the date their Skool access ends. Make the discount real (two months free, or 20 percent for a year) and time-limited.
2. Do not cancel anyone’s Skool subscription for them. Ask them to re-subscribe on your site first, then cancel on Skool, so there is no gap and no double charge. Walk the first few through it on a call if they are high-value.
3. Track it in a sheet: paid member, re-subscribed yes/no, follow-up date. Expect 70 to 85 percent of paying members to move if the community is active; the rest were already leaving.

Week 4: cut over

1. Switch Skool to read-only in spirit: post a final pinned message that new posts go to the new home, and stop replying there.
2. Turn on the mobile app or home-screen install for the new community so the phone habit survives the move.
3. Export the final member list once more and reconcile against your site: anyone active on Skool who never crossed gets a personal email from you, not a sequence.
4. Cancel the Skool plan at the end of the billing period. Keep the CSV.

What the move costs, and what it saves

Put numbers on it before you start, because the first month costs you time and the following years pay it back.

Line	Staying on Skool	Own WordPress site
Platform fee	About $99 a month, $1,188 a year	$0
Hosting and domain	Included	$150 to $400 a year
Community plugin	Included	$199 to $349 a year
Transactional email	Included	$0 to $120 a year
Payment processing	Stripe’s rate	Stripe’s rate
Your time in month one	0 hours	20 to 40 hours
Year one	About $1,200	$350 to $870 plus your time
Year two on	About $1,200	$350 to $870

The honest version of the table is that the move pays for itself in money within the first year and in ownership immediately, but it charges you a month of evenings up front. If your community makes less than the platform fee, the money is not the reason to move. If it makes more, and most communities that have lasted a year do, the fee is the smallest thing you are paying Skool; the member relationship is the large one.

Keeping the room warm after the move

• Post every day for the first two weeks, and reply to everyone. A new feed has no momentum; you are the momentum.
• Run one live event in week two with the calendar and RSVP inside the new community, so the first thing people do there is show up to something.
• Re-pin the twenty threads you kept and reference them in replies. Old members recognise them; new members find the canon.
• Turn on the app. The members who were most active on Skool were on their phones. If the new community is not on the home screen by week three, their habit goes with the old platform.
• Tell them what changed in month two. Fewer notifications, no competitors in the sidebar, direct messages that stay inside the community: name the improvements, because members do not notice an absence.

The things that go wrong

• Email deliverability. A thousand invitation emails from a WordPress site with default mail settings will land in spam. Send through a transactional provider with your domain authenticated (SPF, DKIM) before week 2.
• Two homes for too long. Every week you keep posting in both halves the migration. Thirty days, then one home.
• Asking members to do work. Every step you ask of a member costs you some of them: set a password, fill a profile, confirm an email. Strip it to one tap.
• Moving the courses last. Paid members are paying for the courses. If they are not there on day one, they will not re-subscribe.

What you get on the other side

A community on your own WordPress site costs the hosting you already pay plus a plugin licence instead of a per-month platform fee; the members, their emails and their payment relationship are yours; and there is no discovery feed next to your content. Clubhaus is built for this move: a member feed, spaces, courses and a mobile-first app on your own site, with migration tools for the member import and one-click invitations in the free plugin, and paid tiers through Stripe, multiple spaces, direct messages and events in Pro. One site, one login, your domain.