Tech Wise Guy

Are you are frequently frustrated by the limitations wordpress.com puts on your blog? If so, you need gain the freedom you are looking for by moving your blog to a self-hosted version of Wordpress. I recently moved my wife’s blog teapartygirl.com from wordpress.com to a self-hosted (and self-installed) wordpress. You can do it too. Here are the the 7 steps how.

1. Find a Wordpress provider

Wordpress.com is the current host of your blog. So the first step is to find a new hosting provider. There are many hosting providers that pre-install Wordpress. Look at Wendy Piersall’s Find the Best Pre-Installed Wordpress Hosting to help you with this part. If you are the technical type and have an existing host that does not provide Worpress, you can install it yourself using the Wordpress Installation Instructions.

2. Obtain your own Domain

Your own domain name is a good idea for any business. The obvious reason is to have a place on the web that is uniquely yours. But an even more important reason is to establish a permanent web location and email address for your customers. Now you can move to another state, or change your Hosting providers, and your email and web address will stay the same.

Many web hosting providers will give you a free domain name when you sign up. If yours does, be sure that the name is Yours and you can take it with you if you move to another hosting provider.

If yours hosting provider does not give your a domain, read your providers help that tells you how to point a domain name to your site. Then go to godaddy.com and get your domain name. In the process of obtaining the domain name, they will ask about DNS servers - use the DNS information you learned from your reading to point your domain to your website. This option is best for people with some technical abilities.

The longest part of this step is finding a good name. Most simple names are gone, so you will have to be creative to find an available name. I have spent many hours trying to find good domain names.

3. Install a Wordpress Theme

The Wordpress on your new site will most likely not have the theme that you used on wordpress.org, so you will need to choose and install a new theme. The best place to look for a theme is http://themes.wordpress.net. You might find yours here. If not, there are a huge number to choose from. The easiest way to install a theme is to use the hosting provider’s control panel to upload the theme. More detailed instructions for uploading your theme can be found at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes#Using_Themes After you have uploaded your them, go to your dashboard, presentation and select your new theme.

4. Import your existing posts and Pages

Under the manage tab, you will find export. Use this to export your current site to your computer. Then go to your new dashboard and use Import (also under Manage) to import the pages into your site. This will give you the content of your site, excluding the sidebar widgets which we will configure next.

This is just a preliminary import. When you are ready to go live on your new site, you will do another import which will bring in only the new items.

5. Get everything looking how you want it.

At this point, keep blogging on your old site. Take your time to get everything looking exactly as you want it to look.

You will need to fix your sidebar. The easiest way I have found to do this is to have the control panel for your old site open in one browser window and the new site control panel in another window. That way, you can easily see what widgets to add and copy the text from widgets on your old site to your new site.

Another configuration that you need to set is the permalinks. Under Options, Permalinks, set your Permalink Structure to match wordpress.com (Date and Time Based). This will make the pages have the same structure on your old and new Wordpress (important for the last step)

The final required configuration change is to make sure that http://www.yoursite.com goes to your blog. This is needed if you use the second method in step seven to redirect wordpress.com traffic to your site (I assume most people will want to do this). If your hosting provider has your blog at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or similar, you will need to do the below steps, or work with your hosting provider to make this change. To do it yourself:

1. Setting the Blog URL on the Options, General page to http://www.yoursite.com
2. Copy the files index.php and .htaccess from the /blog directory on your site to the root ( / ) directory. The control panel for your site should have a tool for moving files, otherwise you would need to telnet/ssh to the server and make the change (for Technical people only)

If you use images from wordpress.com in your posts, I recommend moving them over to your new site. You can leave them as they are, but if your wordpress.com account ever gets deleted, you will loose these image from your blog. This task can be a bit tedious if you have lots of images, but the process is not a particularly hard one. In brief, for each image on your old site:

1. Right click and save the image to your computer
2. Edit the same post on your new site
3. Delete the image from the post, and leave the cursor in the image location
4. Use the Upload tool at the bottom of the page to upload the appropriate image
5. Send To Editor will put the image in the location of the cursor

6. Re-Import your existing posts and pages

When you feel like your site is ready to go, you will need to re-import your website like you did above. however, since re-importing will only bring in new posts (and the associated comments), you should first delete the last two or three posts from your new website. This will bring those posts back in and bring in any comments that were left on those posts after your first import.

Your new site is now ready to go live.

7. Point your old blog to your new blog

This is an important step, since you want your readers to be able to find your new blog. I have two options for how to do this.

Option 1: Put a final post on your old blog with a link to your new blog.

This is the easy solution, but as it requires your readers to re-bookmark (or re-configure their RSS reader), it is only suitable for newer blogs with a few readers.

Option 2: Configure Wordpress.com to forward people to your new site.

Wordpress.com will forward your blog to an external name if you purhase the Domain Mapping upgrade, for a cost of $10 per year. If you have many users, this is not a significant cost for the convenience of them being automatically redirected to your site.

So the steps for forwarding people from wordpress.com to wordpress.org are:

1. On the Upgrade tabs, Purchase Domain mapping
2. Click on the Domains sub-tab
3. In the Add a domain box, enter your domain.
4. Click on the Put Blog here button. Any visitor to your wordpress.com site should be automatically redirected to your new site.
5. Try going to your old site to see

Conclusion

Freedom! Your blog should now be live on your new hosting and all your old traffic going to the new site. The limitations of wordpress.com should be behind you. Enjoy your freedom and the new features available to you.