Migrating Wordpress.com blogs to your own hosted Wordpress install.
Over the last few days I endured the process of migrating my blog “Life Changing Stuff” which was previously hosted on WordPress.com across to my hosting provider Bluehost, and in the process I changed its name and plonked it under its own domain name. The blog had only been up for about a month, and had started to see increasing popularity, but I could already feel some of the restrictions that WordPress.com imposes starting to bite so I needed to flea.
The main issues I had with WordPress.com:
- Firstly, and mainly, I wanted more control over the templates (ie for tweaking, which they do not permit).
- Secondly, I wanted to use Google Analytics for my stats, but since WordPress.com already has Google Analytics code embedded in the templates for their purposes, they do not permit a second set of tracking codes and so it is not possible to use Google Analytics with Wordpress.com.
- At some point I want to be able to promote products etc. From reading around the traps, I get the impression that this kind of activity is frowned upon by Wordpress.com, and that was going to be a brick wall for me.
- The inability to use plug-ins
These restrictions were sufficient enough for me to decide to move it. Much better to move it now too, while the traffic was still modest, rather than later, when the website becomes one of the most popular on the Internet! LOL ;)
Tips for moving your Wordpress.com blog
Fortunately, Wordpress has a nice export/import feature which can be found in the dashboard (under Manage > Import/Export), which exports your blog posts, comments and pages into a plain XML file.This makes the task of migrating considerably easier.
One thing the export/import process does not do, is backup your image files and any other files you may have previously uploaded. As far as I can tell these need to be managed separately, which is the nuisance bit. Any posts that have images included in them, end up having broken images since the import process does not modify the path to the files (ie. the code still loads images in from the old site). Which works fine until you can the old one! This means that you need to open up each blog post for editing, locate your image placeholders and delete them, and then re-add your images to the media library and the post as it sits on your new blog. This part was a bit tedious.
One important tip, is to disable commenting on the old blog before you export the XML file. I didn’t, and in the time it took me to export from the WordPress.com, and then install onto the new hosted WordPress install and decommission the old one I had received a couple of comments. I ended up re-adding these few comments to the relevant posts on the new site, manually.
Another problem I identified but saw no way around, was the issue of redirecting visitors to the old site to the new. So, now the blog has moved across, I need to begin re-promoting the blog to reestablish a steady flow of traffic once again. Sorry loyal subscribers/readers…hopefully you’ll find your way back here soon!
On the whole, migrating was not too much of a headache, but a couple of things like the image management could have been handled better. There may well be some plug-ins available that facilitate this whole process. However, I have now been through it, discovered many of the pitfalls, but survived relatively unscathed, and I now consider myself a pseudo-expert on the subject. Contact me if you have questions about the process, or would like some help.
What has been YOUR experience moving WordPress blogs? The floor is yours…
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