Follow-up to Moving from WordPress.com to Self-Hosted

Last week I wrote a guide for how to move from WordPress.com to a self-hosted setup. Some of the comments on that post were so helpful that I wanted to highlight them in a new post.

Lid said:

Great post Michael – thanks!

One thing I did want to mention – because we have just had huge dramas doing this ourselves – is that WordPress.com does allows its blogs to be redirected to your own self-managed domain, for a fee of $10/year. (This is managed within the WordPress administration dashboard, select “Upgrades” and then “Domains”.)

The only problem with this is that it uses a 302 (temporary) redirect instead of the 301 (permanent) redirect that Google prefers…so yep, you lose your links.

I agree that you really should set up your own self hosted blog up front – because the day will come that you want to move, and then it gets tricky.

Mad said:

I just want to follow up on Lid’s comment that it is possible to get WordPress.com to redirect your blog hosted by them to your new domain name.

We found the whole issue confusing, and ended writing an Open Letter to Automattic in frustration and Matt provided the necessary information to get it done.

We also wrote up a step by step guide on how to redirect your WordPress.com blog to your own WordPress hosted blog.

The hardest part was convincing ourselves that it was OK to fiddle with our domains DNS settings, which GoDaddy (our host) made very easy, and I assume other hosts would offer similar screens.

I hope this is of help to others.

You can see this in action as http://blogwell.wordpress.com is automatically redirected to http://blog-well.com.

Sandy said:

I also have recently transitioned from Wordpress.com to my own pay server running Wordpress. And just like Carla, my main problem was with redirecting permalinks. I am going to post a how-to regarding this soon, but in a nutshell, there are two things you need to do to make this transition smoother:

1. You need to pay Wordpress.com to use your own domain name. That way, yourblog.com will be redirected to yourblog.wordpress.com. Google will use yourblog.com to establish permalinks.

2. When it’s time to move to your own server, simply move yourblog.com along with it. The only remaining trick is if you decide on a different permalink structure (Wordpress.com uses /year/month/day/postname), and there’s a Wordpress plug-in called Permalink Redirect that takes care of that for you.

I didn’t do 1) so I had to manually link all my old articles to the new permalink.

There was one more issue that required a MySQL query to fix – internal links from my blog posts needed to be edited to reflect the new permalinks. Luckily I found someone who gave me step by step instructions on how to edit the Wordpress MySQL database directly.

I would like to thank you folks for your super-helpful comments. You are examples of how commenting on other blogs is supposed to be: contributing value that comes back to yourselves while building relationships and community.