Moving your free WordPress blog to self hosted WordPress

Image via Wikipedia

Moving from a WordPress.com blog to your own domain is said to quite easy and it is, to a degree.
There isn’t a lot of information available online, for some strange reason it’s a closely guarded secret and some of it is wrong or misleading (so I found out when I tried it).

Lots of us start out with a free wordpress site, if your blogs domain ends in .wordpress.com then you have a free one. These are great for learning how to blog and practising on before you decide whether or not to go the self hosted route. WordPress place advertising discreetly on these blogs and they get the revenue which is only fair, they are hosting your site and it does cost money to do so.

In my case my blog was to become part of the Essex Virtual Town Hall, and I needed to control the advertising that was on the site. So it had to be moved to it’s own domain on my hosting.

What did I do?
I exported all my blogs postings from WordPress into a file on my desktop, just in case.
Then I set up my WordPress blog on it’s own domain and then imported all the blogs to it.

See simple. Pah, what about all those broken links when I deleted my site from the free wordpress site?

The solution is out there, and we have it here too. This document can be distributed freely with links etc, it explains how to move your wordpress blog without breaking all the links you have built up. you can download it from here, it’s written by Blogwell.com

how-to-redirect-a-wordpresscom-blog

Wished I had found it before I had imported mine, but it works fine so I am not complaining

Anyone else tried it? What did you do?

Sarah