Migrating Your Wordpress.com Site to your own Domain and Host

July 4th, 2008 by Glenn

Setting up a blog on Wordpress.com - a hosted platform for Wordpress blogs - is quick and easy. But once you get serious about wanting to build your own business, you will be interested in your own domain name.

Wordpress.com allows you to upgrade to your own domain for a small fee, which is a great feature. (OM4Business.com also allows you to have a free hosted Wordpress site with a mapped domain, but we don’t charge for it).

Some people want to migrate from Wordpress.com to their own domain on another host. And this is where it gets a bit tricky. It is very easy to move, but very easy to lose all your search engine indexing. So your traffic might take a big hit, and take a long time to recover.

Think about it - if you have a page indexed at mysite.wordpress.com, when that page goes off the air (because it is now at mysite.com), Google just rubs it out of the index.

Worpdress.com doesn’t offer you any way to redirect your subdomain site to a new domain hosted elsewhere.

However there is a way to migrate without losing your search rankings.

Buy your new domain mysite.com through your own domain registrar.
Have a look at what Google and Yahoo have already indexed for your site. Use the site:mysite.wordpress.com query in Google and Yahoo search to do this. You’ll need to keep an eye on this to notice re-indexing.
Pay $10 and upgrade to your new domain with Wordpress.com. Wordpress will automatically create redirects for all your pages at mysite.wordpress.com to mysite.com (for the technically minded, these are 302 redirects, not 301s). Wordpress.com will also update the xml sitemap for your site, showing the new domain name.
Now you have to be patient and wait for your site to be spidered and for the search engines to follow the redirects. Use that same query on site:mysite.com to see when your pages are re-indexed at the new location.
When the index for your key pages is complete, you can move your Wordpress.com site to your new home - perhaps you will download Wordpress from Wordpress.org to do this, or be moving your site to our platform. Either way you will need to use the Export function to get your site content in XML and import it to the new site. You will need to have a copy of all your media files (images, videos, PDFs) and migrate these yourself, as these don’t come with the export.
Don’t change the page slugs. Google now has mysite.com (and mysite.com/about) indexed, and this is exactly what the URLs are for your site at your new domain.

Your new site - mysite.com - is now operational on its new host, and your ’search engine equity’ has been preserved.

Tags: migration, redirects, wordpress.com
Posted in Wordpress. Permalink for this post: permalink.

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2 Responses to “Migrating Your Wordpress.com Site to your own Domain and Host”

Justin Davies
July 20th, 2008 at 7:39 pm

Hi Glenn, having been through the joy and pain of migrating my site to my own host, I have enjoyed the ability to control everything. And as you said it would, it can take up a lot of time tinkering. But overall I would recommend the move, particularly for being able to use Google Analytics, Feedburner etc

However, one of my posts on my old Wordpress site (new address for the post is http://justindavies.com.au/2007/02/09/people-process-technology-still-the-3-keys-to-successful-application-development-projects/
is still getting BIG traffic - as much as 10 times any of my other posts there. So, I have put a link at the post directing people to the new site. I know I am getting some, but probably not all of people visiting clicking to the new site.

Whilst the process you have described here is simple and painless (take heed anybody reading this, and get Glenn to help you!!), once you have made the move it is basically a question of leave the old site and enjoy what redirects you have - or kill it and hope that your new site will eventually get picked up to the same extent. For now, I am leaving the old site….
Glenn
July 20th, 2008 at 8:37 pm

Hi Justin, that is pretty cool, your post ranks #1 worldwide for a search on [people process technology] - people who know what it the term means know that it matters.

Not being able to do a 301 redirect for that post is a bugger. And since you have already setup the new domain, I can’t see any options for getting a 301 in place. The approach in this post would have worked for a migration like yours, ensuring all the traffic for the old post went to the new site (provided you did it when you migrated the site).

As you are getting a lot of traffic on that, you could:
- write a new post optimized for people, process, technology (new words, same sentiment)
- link to the new post from the old post
- do a few more links from old posts to new posts to pass authority
- get all your consulting associates to link to your new post
- once the authority of your new site kicks in, your new post might outrank your old one.

Google’s Keyword Tool suggests this is a 1,900mth search term, so well worth the effort

One more thing - if you do this query in Google site:yoursite.com you will see your blog title is presented in titles first, getting in the way of unique titles for each post. Install the All in one SEO plugin and lose your blog title in favour of just the post title. You will find your posts rank a whole lot better.