DIY guide · Medium API
Own your SEO without abandoning Medium
Medium gave you distribution. WordPress gives you plugins, schema markup, and URLs you control. Teams that outgrow Medium do not always leave overnight—they sync. Here is how to run that migration as a system, not a weekend of copy-paste.
Why WordPress still wins the long game
Medium optimizes for reading on Medium. WordPress optimizes for your funnels: categories, related posts, email capture, WooCommerce, hreflang, editors who do not code. Founders and editorial teams hit a wall when Google starts ranking medium.com instead of their domain—or when they need a paywall Medium does not offer.
The mistake is treating migration as a one-time export. The winning pattern is continuous sync: Medium remains where you draft and discover; WordPress remains the system of record for the open web.
The pain of manual import
Copy-paste destroys formatting. Images break. Internal links point wrong. Duplicate posts multiply when someone imports the same essay twice. Legal and SEO teams worry about canonical tags. Nobody wants to own that process weekly.
Automation is not laziness—it is quality control. Same input every time, same mapping rules, same metadata stored for deduplication.
A sync architecture that editors accept
Editors want a draft queue. Engineers want idempotent jobs. The compromise:
Discover new Medium posts on a schedule. Import body as Markdown or HTML—Markdown is kinder to most themes. Create WordPress posts as draft first. Notify Slack or email. Publish after a human skims. Store medium_article_id in post meta so the job never double-imports.
Pull article info for featured images, tags, and reading time so posts look native, not stripped.
Canonical and SEO (read this twice)
Until you fully move, pick a canonical strategy and document it. Many teams keep Medium canonical early, then flip when traffic justifies redirects. Zenndra does not replace that decision—it feeds the content layer while you make it.
Why Zenndra beats scrapers for CMS sync
CMS migrations are long-lived. Scrapers rot. An API with versioned docs and stable ids is an operations choice: fewer fires, clearer monitoring, predictable costs.
Your cron job should log: fetched, skipped-duplicate, created-draft, failed-with-error. Those metrics become your dashboard.
Rollout plan
Phase 1: Import last ten posts, fix theme CSS, train one editor. Phase 2: Automate nightly with drafts only. Phase 3: Optional auto-publish for trusted authors. Phase 4: Deprecate Medium URLs only when analytics say so.
Each phase is sellable to stakeholders. Nobody has to bet the company on a big bang.
When you are ready
If WordPress is where revenue and SEO live, treating Medium as an upstream source—not the final home—is how grown-up teams run both. Zenndra is the pipe. You keep the strategy.