As I continue blogging about marketing, business, and entrepreneurial stuff it only makes sense to start talking about blogging as well. As I’ve said before, I have a unique audience here, consultants, SEOs, Web designers, bloggers, offline business owners and more, so I want to continue creating content for all of you. Sometimes that content will fit into a wide spectrum, other times it will serve a very specific purpose for a very specific group.
This is one of those posts that are for a very specific group.
This post is actually an idea sparked from my girlfriend’s mom. She’s been blogging for a while and has developed a following using the free wordpress.com blog platform. She’s at the point where she would like to have more control and use a standalone blog. The problem is, how do you migrate everything over, comments, posts, etc.? How do you set things up? It can be a daunting task for someone that doesn’t deal with servers, hosting, domain name settings and other stuff on a daily basis.
So lets get to it.
Getting Away From WordPress.com
The main reason you want to get away from the wordpress.com platform and move to a self hosted wordpress blog is an issue of control vs. limitations. WordPress.com is basically free, but you are limited. You can’t add amazon affiliate widgets, you can’t add a lot of different plugins, you can’t make major modifications to themes, you’re just limited in a lot of things that you do. You can’t use any third party advertising network, not just amazon affiliate links but Google Adsense and other platforms.
You’re also stuck with the wordpress analytics instead of the more detailed, more advanced Google Analytics.
Here’s a video that highlights the differences:
Getting Started With the Migration
Even if you aren’t the most tech savvy, you can get through the migration pretty easily. It may seem difficult at first but it really isn’t, these steps will walk you through the process.
Step 1: Hosting Your WordPress Site
Since you’re moving away from the free wordpress.com platform, to the self hosted, unrestricted wordpress platform you need to find a hosting service.
If you don’t already have a custom domain name, you can sign up with NameHero for pretty cheap and have reliability of cloud hosting. They also have a cool option in the checkout process that will automatically install wordpress for you as they setup your hosting account. I recently wrote a review about them and compared the performance to other major hosting companies.
There are other good hosting companies out there as well, bluehost and hostgator are other options you have available.
If you already had a domain purchased through wordpress, you should be able to change the nameservers to the new configuration the hosting company gave you, or you can pay the $13 to have WordPress redirect your domain to the new domain.
Enter Your Email For MORE Awesome Content As It Happens
Step 2: Installing WordPress On Your Server
Above, I mentioned that using NameHero for hosting you have an option in the sign up where you they preinstall wordpress for you during the registration process. That’s obviously the easiest way, but if you chose a different hosting company or decided to install it yourself there are a couple more steps involved.
So lets quickly go through those steps.
Check your welcome email, you will have information on how to get to your control panel or cpanel. It’s usually yourdomainname.com/cpanel but it will vary host to host. Use the user name and password they gave you.
Once you log into your cPanel you’ll see a Software/Services section. If you chose NameHero like I mentioned before, you will see what is displayed in the image below.
For the NameHero users, you will want to click on the Softaculous option. Other hosts may have that option as well, or if you use hostgator it will display as “quick install”.
So go ahead and click the Softaculous option, you will see a screen like the image below:
Obviously, you want to continue using wordpress so put your mouse pointer on the wordpress option, you will see a roll over that has a button labeled, “Install”.
You will be taken to a screen, I’m not going to post a screenshot because there’s no real need to. You really only have to worry about setting your wordpress password. Please, PLEASE choose a difficult password and store it somewhere, wordpress sites tend to get hacked pretty easily if you have a weak password.
If you use NameHero, you can even select a free theme during the preinstall section.
That’s all you have to do, and you have wordpress setup on your server. It will probably take you 5 minutes, maximum to do that, it has taken me much longer to explain all this than it would for you to do it.
Step 3: Exporting Data From Your WordPress.com Blog
So you bought your own web hosting service, you have your domain name, and you have a self hosted version of wordpress installed on your new server. Pretty good for just a few minutes of work, right?
Well, if you’ve been using wordpress.com for a while, you probably don’t want to lose your comments, your posts, images and all the other stuff you’ve accumulated over there.
That’s a problem…. or is it?
You will want to log into your wordpress.com blog’s admin panel, scroll down to “Tools” and click “Export”. Here’s an image displaying that:
Once you click on export, you get taken to a page where you get to choose whether you want to export your data yourself, or waste $129 on a guided export with wordpress. I would assume you want to save the $129 and do it yourself, afterall it’s only going to take a minute or so.
Here’s an image showing the export screen… you probably want to export all content, instead of just pages, or just comments, etc.
Select all content, unless you have a weird reason why you only want one thing and not the rest. Make sure you save the file somewhere that you can easily access it.
You’re now almost there….
Step 4: Importing content to your new blog
You essentially do the same thing that you did in step 3, only this time it’s the newly created blog that you have on your own hosting, and instead of exporting, you import. So go to tools, select import and then you get taken to a screen where you have different importing options.
The option you want to choose is wordpress, since you’re importing from another wordpress site.
Click the browse button to find the XML file you saved from the wordpress.com export. Now you upload and install that file. You will be given certain options like assigning posts to a user, etc. This is pretty straight forward stuff.
Important note: If you want to keep your subscribers, which I assume you do, WordPress has put out a help guide to show you what you need to do. Click here to see it.
Summary
This should give you the knowledge and direction to start hosting your own WordPress blog, instead of using the limited wordpress.com platform.
However, it’s just the beginning. There are many other things you will have to consider like monetization, increasing subscriber growth, etc.
Great post full of a lot of very helpful info! I have a couple of questions. If a person moves their blog from wordpress.com to wordpress.org what happens to their followers, will they still be alerted of new posts? and is the control panel on wordpress.org the same as wordpress.com?
Glad you found it helpful! Your followers will be alerted of new posts in the reader, but not by email. They will need to resubscribe to your blog to get the email alerts but the reader feed will still display your posts. This explains it in more detail: https://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/moving-your-subscribers/
Control Panel is pretty much the same.
There is actually no need for the “resubscribe” process if you are using the “JetPack” plugin. if you look at http://jetpack.me/support/subscription-migration-tool/ you will see that it does all of the process pretty effortlessly. AND sends out nice reminders that A) you are going to move and B) that the move is complete. pretty sweet stuff!
Paul, I thought they require you to resubscribe in order to get the email alerts instead of the reader updates. Are you sure? I know WP will move the subscribers for you but I thought they needed to resubscribe in order to get the emails for new posts.
Yes, that is true if you are not using the Jetpack plugin. In the WordPress.com environment there are “followers” and to pass them across to “list members” you would have to have them resubscribe.
With the use of the Jetpack Plugin youcan keep your “Followers” as “Followers” One of JetPacks many features is the ability to bridge .com features to your .org ( self hosted site )
This whole issue does bring up the quiet little trade off that no one speaks of. wordpress.com is really a pretty cool community development tool unto itself. You write a post and get e-mails that people are now following you. The easiest way to explain it, its Social.
I hate to geekify the discussion, but I do use wordpress.com sites as a kinda web 2.0 structure. Not so much for the linking but the social aspects and the direct ability to communicate with “Followers” to entice them to become “list members”.
Depending on the number within your community.. I would possibly suggest Keeping the .com site and simply duplicate the content from the .org site. Keeping the .com community in tact and flourishing.
The best overall analogy I can come up with is you have a twitter account, and you just opened a Facebook account. You want all of your twitter followers over on FB. – the flip side of this is develop FB on its own and simply duplicate the content over to twitter using IFTTT keeping the 2 communities separate but unified.
You made sense then you talked about keeping the .com and duplicate the content, but you already said you can keep your followers, so what’s the point? If anything, wouldn’t it make sense to curate the content and publish a summary on the .com with a link to the full blog .org?
When you start thinking that wordpress.com sites are a social platform and not a just blogging platform things change a bit. you have developed a community and a method to maintain and GROW that community.
I have never tried it, but I am not so sure curated link content is going to have the same effect. I would presume your “following” patterns would drop.
I guess there is only one way to find out – TEST. I have a series I’m about to throw on one of my “duplicated” sites so I will try this out and see what happens – and then follow up with a quick report
Paul, can you expand on that a bit? Earlier you said you basically take your community with you, with Jetpack, so what difference does it really make? My thinking was if you kept your wordpress.com subdomain and summarized content as a preview with a full link that could help in a number of ways. Kind of like the LinkedIn publishing strategy for traffic generation. All that aside though… if you get to keep your followers, and subscribers, what difference does it make?
Yes you can keep the ones you have, but severing the tie stops the Growth within the wordpress.com community. going back to the analogy of having a twitter following and deciding to change over those you have to FB. Twitter is no longer a place of gain if all of the focus falls to FB.
The same principles apply your wordpress.com followers. sure you can transfer the ones you have, and then you migrate 100% to the .org site ( self hosted ) that avenue of growth you had before with the .com blog is gone.
What I practice and what I suggest is maintaining the .com site as much as possible to keep the community and growth as well as developing the new .org site for the obvious reasons.
I’ve been wanting to move to a self hosted blog. This helps a lot. Also curious about the follower thing.
Thanks for the comment, take a look above!
Lol@ these people
Nice touch.
Nice tutorial and really helpful..
Glad you enjoyed it Jack!
Hi. ,like Terri I am clueless, I currently have a paid site. It’s. .com and not wordpress.com. Will it affect me the change over and am I able to do all the things you mentioned above like adverts etc, when I’m ready or do I need to change over too. I’m a bit clueless at this. Thank you.. Great post. Hope I will be as good oneday. not… 🙂
Thanks for the comment Beverley. You have to move to a self hosted version if you want to have advertisements, like using Google Adsense, to make money from your blog, or if you wanted to add an amazon widget, or other affiliate links. You aren’t able to do that unless you are on a self hosted version. You should be able to bring everything with you, content, comments, followers, etc. and if you are unsure about it all, you can always keep your existing wordpress site and revert back later on, or use both at the same time. 🙂