You already have a blog on WordPress.com.
As you know, WordPress.com does not allow you to install external plugins or themes. Generally you cannot control your entire blog.
Now you want to take your blog to the next level. You want to get the most out of WordPress to grow your blog.
Your solution now is to move your blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. In other words, you switch to a self-hosted solution. But are you still a little hesitant despite knowing its benefits?
Because you are afraid of problems related to technical problems. In addition, you are afraid that the migration process may affect your blog’s ranking on Google.
In this article, I will give you a step-by-step guide to migrate your blog to WordPress.com. I also covered how to keep your blog ranking on Google when switching to WordPress.org.
Are you ready?
We begin the process of migrating our blog to WordPress.org.
Contents
Some things you need to prepare to get started
You need a domain name. In addition, you need to register for a hosting service. Domain names you can register at Namecheap . Namecheap quality and price are very good.
Hosting service, you can refer to HawkHost , the most popular shared host service in Vietnam. If you are new to HawkHost, you can refer to the article What is HawkHost? Is HawkHost any good?
Step 1: Export data from WordPress.com
Log in to the admin section with your WordPress.com account. Click Export under the Tools menu:
When you click Export, you will see a new page where you can choose between Free or Guided Transfer. Here you will choose Free.
After clicking on the Start Export button, you will move to the next screen. This screen helps you select what data you want to move to the new location.
Select All Content to export all your blog data as an XML file. This file you will use to switch to the self-hosted website in the next step.
Step 2 Install WordPress
You now have all the data from your blog on WordPress.com. The next step is to install a copy of WordPress on the server of your hosting company. You can check out my complete WordPress installation guide article here .
Step 3 Transfer data to the self-hosted WordPress site you installed in step 2
To transfer old data from WordPress.com to your new site, you need to log in to the admin section of the new site. Then click on Tools >> Import as shown below
To perform the data transfer process you must install the WordPress Importer plugin . So you click on “Install Now” to install the plugin. After installing the plugin, click on Run Importer to move to the next screen
At this point, you just need to select the XML file downloaded in the previous step. When you start importing, you have to choose an author for old articles. One is that you select the current user on your new site. Or you create a new user. If you use images in the article, then check the Download and import file attachments option
Step 4 Redirect Users and Keep SEO
Your blog already has a relative number of users and has good rankings on Google. 301 redirects are the best solution to preserve SEO values when using a self-hosted solution.
Specifically, if a user logs into the old blog they will be redirected to your new page. One hitch here is that you cannot access the .htaccess file on WordPress.com to configure the redirect.
However, WordPress.com offers a paid service to perform redirects. That service is Site Redirect .
The price of this service is $13 per year. If the cost bothers you, you only need to use one year. A sufficient amount of time for users to remember your new page.
The move from WordPress.com to a self-hosted solution is often associated with a domain name change. For example, the domain name will change from yoursitename.wordpress.com to yoursitename.com.
When you change the domain like this, you need to update the URLs of the old linked articles. You don’t want an article to still point to another article with the domain yoursitename.wordpress.com, right?
Luckily, there is a plugin that makes this job easier. That’s the Velvet Blues Plugin .
After downloading and activating the plugin, simply enter the old URL and the new URL. Everything else is left to the plugin to handle:
Just to be sure, I still recommend manually checking the links again.
Epilogue
Hopefully with my detailed guide above, you already know how to move your blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted solution.
If you face any difficulty, please leave a comment below. Good luck with your blog transition.
