Transfering WordPress.com to Your Own Domain for WordPress
I received an email this morning from one of our bloggers, Deb, who asked a great question. “How do I switch from my hosted WordPress blog to my own domain name, without breaking the TOS for Blogitive?” I decided to make this a blog posting to help anyone else who may have this question.
Thanks for getting in touch regarding your blog domain switch. Switching to your own domains is a great idea. We actually have some Blogitive products coming out soon that will only work for people with blogs on their own domains.
If you are using WordPress and switching to a new domain, this can be a fairly easy process. First, if you have more than one domain, you may want to consider hosting at MediaTemple.net. Their Grid Server program is really excellent. For $20 per month (or $200 per year), you get 100 gigs of storage, 1 terabyte of bandwidth, and you can host up to 100 different domains. They also have 1-Click install on the latest version of WordPress.
Once you have your new domain hosted, you want to set up a fresh install of WordPress. You then want to back up your database of postings to import into your new copy. You should be able to find an export database feature somewhere in your admin tool. (If anyone reading this knows exactly where this is on the hosted WordPress blogs, please chime in). Once you get that database backed up, importing is a easy thing to do on your new WordPress blog.
The transfer is the easy part. The main issue that our advertisers will have is getting your site re-indexed into Google, and getting all your pages back into the index. The best way to do this is to try to make your site as popular as you can with linking.
First, make sure to submit your new feed to Feedburner.com right away. Then after you bring your hosted blog entries to your new blog, place a few postings on your old blogs with links to your new blog. Make sure to link to some of the internal pages that you posted for Blogitive.
You also want to make a sitemap right away for your new site. Here is a link to a great Google Sitemap tool for WordPress.
After that it’s just a matter of getting more links to your blog. Submit into directories, follow up on anyone whose blog roll your on and make sure they switch to your new domain. Check Technorati and Google to see who is currently linking to your blog, and ask them to direct those links to your new URL’s.
If may take 30 days or so to get back in the index, but you will get back in.
If anyone reading this is willing to link to Deb’s new blogs, or has other suggestions to help her with her switch, please leave a comment.
November 9th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
With Wordpress.com cracking down on bloggers using blogitive and other “paid posting” services, I think now is a great time for everyone to switch. Hopefully your instructions make it easy for them to do so!
November 9th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Hey Colleen, It’s Deb from Surviving NJ
Glad to see you here as well.
Great article, thx for answering this way. It can help everyone now!
November 10th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
Hopefully the WP guys will update their domain name mapping to encompass going from blog.wordpress.com to blog.com
So you don’t lose the backlinks.
Losing backlinks is a pain and can take more than 6 months to rebuild.
November 12th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
I completely agree. I have wanted to do this but was hesitant for the reasons mentioned. I think now is the time to do it and just bite the bullet. Also if you continue to post at both sites for the month would that help?
November 15th, 2006 at 10:42 pm
For those making the switch from WP.com to selfhosted, be sure to grab this plugin for your new blog: http://www.technosailor.com/wordpress-to-wordpress-import/
It will give your new WordPress installation the ability to “consume” the export from your old WordPress.com blog.
November 27th, 2006 at 7:07 am
I decided to keep the two older blogs I have in place, as well as start new ones on my own domain. Keeping them intact while building new ones.
After a year’s time of my last post for blogitive taken on those older blogs, I will consider what to do at that time…to continue those blogs, or only post to the newer ones. Moving everything and chancing losing things is not worth the risk or built up PR for me at this point.
January 5th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
It shouldn’t be too hard moving it to your own domain but what about backlinks? What is going to save these to get them back to your website?