How do I copy a site from a private server to WordPress.com?

First of all have a look at this link : https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Moving_WordPress
Check if you have ftp access. That way you can upload and manage the files on hosting.
For accessing file structure through wp admin i would suggest this plugin that has many options related to file managing

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wp-filemanager/

tell me if it helps

I’m sorry but these forums are for self-hosted WordPress sites only. Please try asking your question on https://en.forums.wordpress.com/

I now realise this. Sorry. We decided to make it a self-hosted solution as WordPress.com doesn’t give access to the files.

But it is obvious that the process of moving an entire site could be made a lot easier.

A friend developed a site, theme and various other goodies for me on his commercial site.

Is his site a wp site? Was the site he developed for you working – wp actually installed, the database built etc.?

If you have no data yet it may be you just need to install wp and use the theme that was developed for you.

WP really works best with absolute links. Since the posts are rendered dynamically wp keeps track of where everything is in the database.

It was a fully working site, but try as I might (and I tried for two days) I cannot reconstruct the functionality or themes he used. So copying the whole site over was the best solution. As it happens, we are going to use that install commercially to do the job but in future I would like to know how to do this without resorting to command lines.

What part of this went wrong?
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Moving_WordPress#Moving_to_a_New_Server

I could not ftp to wordpress.com. That’s what went wrong.

We decided to make it a self-hosted solution as WordPress.com doesn’t give access to the files.

So you have yet to move it to the new host and server?