Image: AODdesign
Yes it can be done.
Forget what you have read in the forums (Why can’t I redirect my blog? and Can I redirect my blog?) and don’t bother trying to get your head around the too technical product announcement (New Feature: Domains).
We have written a step by step guide on how to redirect your established WordPress.com blog to your own self-hosted blog on your own domain – Redirecting a WordPress.com Blog (PDF 739 KB).
Why do this?
We just like WordPress – that’s all.
Update: Based on the excellent comments, we have updated the original document to include a section on setting the permalink style to that used by WordPress.com – thank you everyone for helping us make this better.
empressofdrac:
you probly just need to wait for the dns changes to propogate…
type in “ipconfig /flushdns” in YOUR MACHINE(not the server), to clear your dns cache.. it should speed up the process a little bit.. but it also depends on how soon the cache in your isp’s dns expires..
at most it is 48 hours…
@empressofdrac – as usual paan comes to the rescue. As of now, your domain is active and WordPress is redirecting your WordPress.com blog to it. Congrats.
My bad, I really have a short patience in waiting…it’s actually my fault…I changed my domain name servers to wordpress again…tsk…tsk…
Thanks for the feedback guys…I’ll just wait…I just set my dns to its default settings…
Migrating from wordpress.com to wordpress.org ain’t that easy actually…thanks for your blog, it’s really very helpful…
Kudos!
[...] Set a redirection from your wordpress.com site to your self-hosted site. I’m actually very thankful to this [...]
[...] Moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org – A comprehensive guide to redirecting your hosted WordPress.com blog to your one on your own server. Haven't tried it but it appears to make sense. [...]
[...] Moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org – A comprehensive guide to redirecting your hosted WordPress.com blog to your one on your own server. Haven't tried it but it appears to make sense. [...]
[...] Moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org | BlogWell – Useful post on redirecting between wp.com and your self hosted blog. Via Pete Ashton. [...]
This is very good and also very useful information. The difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.comis making using their blog some very dull and very hard thing.
This is a hack and not a nice solution by WordPress.com IMO. They should provide a switch that just does the re-direct to the site of your choosing without fooling around with the DNS Gods. We have email, a website and plenty of other stuff on our website. Since they don’t allow you to re-direct to a subfolder on your domain, it is only good for people who’s domain is purely a blog and nothing else. Wasted my time and money with this trip down the garden path.
If you pay wordpress.com for mapping an existing domain name, are you now effectively using wordpress.org (e.g. you can now do templates, plug-ins, etc.)?
@Lori – Yes. Yes you paying WordPress.com to redirect your WordPress.com blog to an external site, one which would typically be running the open source WordPress software, as distributed by WordPress.org, with the site being self managed or managed through a 3rd party provider.
So, I would need to pay a third party to host the blog?
@Lori – Yes. WordPress.org offers a list of hosting companies which provide the ability to perform automatic WordPress installations. See http://wordpress.org/hosting/. GoDaddy, who host BlogWell, also offers painless installation of WordPress.
@Edward – I agree that you should be able to redirect to a subfolder within your domain – I would provide feedback through your blog’s dashboard.
Also, fiddling with DNS is not for the faint of heart, in fact setting up redirection for BlogWell was the first time I have ever had to do this myself.
Given that both Google and Yahoo! accept the creation of a file, whose name they specify, within the root of your domain as sufficient proof of ownership, maybe WordPress.com can use the same strategy. A little more work on their part, but a lot simpler for the normal user.
Thank you, thank you so much for this. It worked perfectly, and would have been a nightmare without your expertise. Thank you for sharing!
I do have a question. In order for my redirects to keep working, will I need to continue paying the $10 annually to wordpress?
Thanks again!
@Linda – we are glad the information was helpful.
If you want to keep the WordPress.com redirection, then you will need to continue paying the applicable annual fee.
If all you want to redirect is the existing Search Engine links, then these should have been updated within the first year, so you should be able to let it lapse; however, if you also want to redirect existing links from other blogs, which will not be updated, then you will need to continue, and at some point determine when to stop, maybe after the 1st, 2nd or 3rd year.
Unfortunately, you can’t use the WordPress.com blog’s stats to determine whether anyone is using links to the WordPress.com since the redirection happens before that.
When you do turn it off, just make sure that the WordPress.com blog has a “we/I have moved” post as the latest.
@Mad
Well, actually Search engines links won’t be updated. That’s one of the gripes people have with wordpress.com not using 301(permanent redirection) status code.
When using the 302( Temporary redirection) status code Search engines won’t update their indexes to the new url. New links, if indexed from their new url will of course have the url linked to the new domain url but old links will still come up in search engines as the original url.
@paan – You are right in that with WordPress using only temporary redirects, then the references to the ‘old’ WordPress.com blog will remain in the search indexes; however, if you migrate the existing content to the self hosted blog (which one would consider the norm), then the search engines will also be indexing this, so each ‘old’ post will be indexed twice (as to whether this constitutes duplicate content I will leave to finer minds than mine).
When you no longer want to redirect your WordPress.com blog I would recommend deleting it so that the old references are deleted from the search engines’ indexes, leaving one the one reference to your posts, namely the ones in your new blog.
[...] la redirección desde wordpress a un dominio en específico es algo truculento, pero gracias a BlogWell la tarea fue fácil ya que ellos lo explican claramente hasta con un documento pdf, para los que no [...]
Thanks a lot this was helpful!
i have checked it’s really great
Hi, I have a wordpress.com blog with my own domain name. Will I lose links, or search engine rankings, or pagerank when I make the switch? Is there a seperate guide or post anyone can recommend in my situation? I am worried about downtime as well. Thanks for your help!
I’m starting to move a blog from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. I am concerned about the duplicate content issue – did you find this to be a problem for you?
Thank you so much for your help!
Great, Thanks a lot for the information. Now I have a question related with subdomains. What I have to do if I want to redirect my wordpress.com blog to a subdomain of my own domain. I mean I want to redirect cardila.wordpress.com to blog.cardila.com. I want to know if the procedure explained here works also for subdomains. I apologize about my English
Carlos
There is actually a much simple way to do it. If you have hosting through godaddy then your in good shape. All you need to do is setup a transfer from wordpress to godaddy. Why do this you might ask. Well if you want all the capibilities that the .org offers you have to. Put the transfered domain in the hosting account. Go to my applications on the summary and install wordpress in the blog section. Don’t worry about updates because godaddy offers a one click update. *Note* I recommend going to what ever site you have and download an export file because you will need that once you have wordpress set up on your server to put back comments and posts pages etc. It can be that simple! Email for questions
Thanks
[...] How did I start it? I did some research and WordPress.org, Blogger.com, and Typepad are probably the most respected platforms right now. If blogging were my top priority at the moment, I’d spend the time and energy to set up a WordPress.org (rather than .com) blog. But since I’m testing the waters, I’ve decided to use WordPress.com. It’s easy to start using and it’s easily transferable to WordPress.org later. [...]
How much downtime for the site can I expect?
@sage
You would most likely find that your site might me down for at most, 1 day. Mine was down only an hour because that is all how long it took for me.
Thanks
http://hugene13.com
I don’t know if I’ve made a mistake or if this is just going to take a while for Go Daddy to get the re-direct working.
I redirected my blog http://mountainsageblog.com to wordpress as directed and then re-directed the wordpress blog http://themountainsage.wordpress.com.
when I go to the wordpress.com site the url now reads http://mountainsageblog.com but the site is the old wordpress site.
I changed the DNS nameserves back to what they were originally in GoDaddy.
Does this process just take awhile? The re-direct to wordpress was much quicker.
Nevermind…It worked!!!! Thanks so much for the instructions.
Any upcoming pdf on going from self-hosted on Blogger to self-hosted on WordPress? Pretty please?
Guys, great great great (clapping hands). I am considering translating this into Spanish, provided I have your permission. It was really helpful, it enabled me to make the switch with no sweat. Thank you guys very much!
Thanks so much for this! I had everything set up i just needed to click was ‘put blog here’ to reverse it! Thanks heaps iIve wanted to get this done for months but i haven’t been able to find the right info
Excellent .pdf file – thanks so much!
Thanks to your instructions I successfully moved my blog to a new server with a domain. I still wonder if this would affect the PR standing at Google even if I have the redirection in place.
This sounds doable, but I have one question.
You wrote that this can’t be done to a folder on my domain, and Carlos asked whether it can be done to a subdomain.
No-one answered that question – so I’m asking again – do the instructions in the pdf work also for a subdomain (e.g. blog.mydomain.com) ??
Thanks in advance
@debi – Yes redirection should work to a sub-domain (blog.example.com).
Hey Mad – thanks for the super-fast reply.
One more question.
If I want to redirect my blog from wordpress.com to a self-hosted blog.mydomain.com (i.e. using wordpress.org) is there a way to do it and still keep all my subscribers, links etc. ???
@Debi – if you keep the same permalink structure on the new site, then the existing links will be automatically redirected to your new site. Subscribers will not be affected, since these links will also be redirected. I would recommend informing your readers, via a post, that you have moved to a new URL, and that they should update RSS feeds, favorites etc over time. This will allow you to decide whether to retain the wordpress.com redirection. Admin access to your wordpress.com blog is still available (this is not redirected) so you can use this to determine whether the old links are still being used.
This has probably been answered already, but I got tired of skimming through everything to try and find it…
I, of course, moved a blog from wordpress.com to my own hosting. Everything ported over fine, after installing the xml file like 5 times. Then, I followed the directions to redirect the wordpress.com site to the new url, but it doesn’t seem to be working. When I do the first half and redirect the new url to the old blog, that part works and it redirects, but after I switch back over to my new hosting provider, it doesn’t seem to effect the old blog. That is, it doesn’t redirect. I paid the 10 bucks for the domain, and clicked the little link to place the site on the new link. Now I’m wondering if this is a common problem?
Anyone? Buehler? Buehler?
@Steward – patience – sometimes DNS changes take a while (Pan says up to a max of 48 hours); although personally with GoDaddy I never had to wait more than 5-10 minutes.
Mad, thank you for the reply.
I just checked on the blog, and it seems like the old one still isn’t redirecting. Very odd.
The old blog is http://www.ryancouch.wordpress.com and the new one is http://www.smalltownpreacher.com .
I have a help request into the wordpress folks, so maybe that’ll bear some fruit.
Thanks for your help.
@Stewart – Working now – either patience was your virtue or the guys @ WordPress helped resolve it.
Yeah, the wordpress guys got back with me. They didn’t say what they did, if anything, they just said it should be working now. Either way, it’s working.
Thank you for your encouragement.
-Stewart
What about the images that are linked in the .com account? they are still in the .com account with the links in the new acct still pointing to those images. But the images are still showing up – it would appear the files on .com aren’t being redirected so the links aren’t broken.
is there an easier way to download all the attachments & upload them to the new site?
@Cathy Tibbles – No easy answer, as you also need to update all internal links to your own posts, which will still reference WordPress.com. Although these are redirected, if the redirection is stopped they will break, and since these are linking to your own posts, you should keep them local.
All I can do is to share my experience when migrating from WordPress.com to blog-well.com
Once the existing blog has been exported, I manually did the the following:
1) Extracted all images URLs from the export file – anything URL which started http://blogwell.files.wordpress.com.
2) Used wget to get each – whilst maintaining the folder structure on my local system
3) Used FTP to push these files onto the new site under http://blog-well.com/wp-content/uploads.
4) Modified the export file to replace “http://blogwell.files.wordpress.com/” with “http://blog-well.com/wp-content/uploads/”.
5) Modified the export file to replace “http://blogwell.wordpress.com/” with “http://blog-well.com/” whilst ensure the same permalink structure is used.
6) Manually split the export file so it is below the maximum import allowed.
I used a combination of perl and a text editor which supported regular expressions to do the work.
As to whether any or all of these are still applicable I don’t know – maybe someone with more recent experience can be of help. Any takers our there?
thank you for a concise step by step instruction guide!
@Mad,
Of particular interest to me is the instructions you gave to Cathy Tibbles for retrieving images and other media used on my wp.com site.
I have been running a blog on WP.com for about a year, and now want to move to self-hosting using GoDaddy (ironically enough!). I have a ton of images that I do not want to lose, in addition to some audio files.
I think I understand your directions clearly, but is doing this going to *remove* the images from my wp.com site? It is still up and running while I work on planning a strategy for moving. This is the first advice for moving images and media that I’ve come across, and I want to make sure I do it correctly.
And what do you mean by “whilst maintaining the folder structure on my local system”? Understand, I have yet to even register with GoDaddy, so all of this is in the planning stage. I just want to ensure that things are ready to go once I make the decision to move.
I appreciate all your help. This post has been a godsend . . .
@tysdaddy – Using wget will get a copy of any images, so this won’t have any effect on the existing WordPress.com blog.
I will illustrate by example, to explain why I maintained the same folder structure, For our WordPress.com blog, files (images, documents etc) were of the form (which is the default setup): “http://blogwell.files.wordpress.com/YYYY/MM/file.ext”.
So I would copy these to a locally to filesYYYYMMfile.ext. (I’m a PC!)
Once I have all the files locally, I could use FTP to copy all folders within “files” to “http://blog-well.com/wp-content/uploads”, so the URL for the files would be: “http://blog-well.com/wp-content/uploads/YYYY/MM/file.ext”.
I would then edit the exported data so that “http://blogwell.files.wordpress.com/” is replaced by “http://blog-well.com/wp-content/uploads/”.
I would also edit the exported data to replace “http://blogwell.wordpress.com/” with “http://blog-well.com/” – assuming the same permalink structure is used – this ensures that any references to other posts will now reference the new blog and not the old one.
I hope this helps.
Very cool logos =D