Tutorial : How to migrate from a Wordpress.com blog to a self-hosted one
This is one of the questions I received since starting this blog - Why and how should I move my Wordpress.com hosted blog to a self-hosted one ?
The answer is pretty simple, while it’s not too much of a hassle to move your blog from the free hosted Wordpress.com platform to a self-hosted one, many people don’t know how to do it. For the benefit of anyone seeking the answer to this question, I decided to write this post.
A self-hosted blog is a blog that is hosted on your own server, rather than on a sub-domain on a free blog hosting platform. Some people might call this Wordpress.org rather than Wordpress.com but that’s a mistake, because Wordpress.org is the place where you download the software from. I don’t want to argue about the names and extensions, I’m just making sure everyone knows what we’re talking about.
With a Wordpress.com hosted blog, they take care of all the technical issues that might look challenging at first. You’ll never have to touch a single line of code, mess with upgrades, plug-ins, databases or themes. All you have to do is just pick a theme ( the design of your blog, often called a theme or template ), and simply start writing your thoughts and ideas. Easy, right ?
You have to keep in mind that …
- Getting a theme that you like is really hard, because none of the available ones suit your needs, but you have little to none skill in customizing any of the themes.
- Sooner or later, you’ll find out that you can’t put AdSense or any other script or widget that runs on JavaScript.
- At one point, you might even want to extend your blog’s functionality with additional plug-ins, but that feature isn’t available on Wordpress.com blogs.
- You gain access to additional statistics.
- You don’t have too much control over your blog, at one point some people could get your blog banner, or Wordpress.com will decided in the future to make some changes that you’re not too happy about.
What will you do then ?
If you’ve ever wondered why so many webmasters recommend that you have your self-hosted blog, I hope that now things are a bit more clear. The only problem with such a migration is that it requires some technical skills and knowledge that most beginners lack.
To make things a bit more simple, I’ve decided to share the steps usually follow, considering that you’ve already purchased a domain :
- Find a good hosting that meets the minimum requirements for Wordpress. ( Check out this post for more information : Wordpress hosting )
- Delete all of your spam comments on your blog and export your posts ( just go to Manage -> Export -> Download Export File ).
- Create a MySQL database on your new hosting for the fresh Wordpress installation.
- Install and configure Wordpress for a first time run.
- Import the Wordpress posts ( just go to Manage -> Import -> Wordpress -> Upload file and import ).
- Install and configure additional plug-ins or widgets.
These steps might be different, depending on the host you’re using. Different hosts, different control panels and different configurations. This is one of the reasons this isn’t quite a step-by-step tutorial, even if I wanted it to be.
I’ve written this tutorial to help you understand things better, and tried to make it as newbie-friendly as possible. If there’s anything you don’t understand or have any question about, use the Contact form to submit your question.
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