Like I mention earlier in my blog before, if you started with wordpress.com, somehow you will come to this day where you wanna migrate to your own wordpress domain. The reason being, with your own domain using the wordpress engine, you are open to freedom to customization, themes, plugins…etc.
The first step is to buy a domain and server space for web blog hosting. I have chosen Blue Host, you can read about how I came about to decide Blue Host in my earlier post here. Let’s get started.
At Blue Host homepage, sign up for a domain package. Once you have successfully signed up for a domain and web hosting, login to the cPanel for Blue Host. In the control panel, scroll down to find the WordPress icon under the software section. Click on it and start the installation. You can see the Blue Host Tutorial here on how to install the WordPress engine. Everything went smoothly just as instructed.
Now lets get ready to migrate all your stuff from your wordpress.com to your own domain.
1. Log on to your wordpress.com blog. (eg. www.yourblog.wordpress.com)
2. From your Dashboard, on the tools at the left side bar, click TOOLS > EXPORT
3. From the restrict author drop list, choose your author. This would be you who is the owner of the blog, unless your blog have several different contributors & authors, then you might wanna select which author’s content you want to export.
4. Click on the DOWNLOAD EXPORT FILE, and save your exported XML file to your computer.
5. On a new tab or window for your browser, login to your new blog (www.yourblog.com) to get ready to import the exported xml file.
6. Before you import your xml file, you need to set the permalinks for your new wordpress first. This is because, wordpress.com use the permalinks format of year/month/day/file-name to name your individual of your blog entries. In your new domain, you need to set the permalinks to match the format that wordpress.com uses, otherwise your imported blog entries will not match the blog and your blog will not be re-directed automatically.
7. On your new domain, click on SETTING > PERMALINKS and choose the year/month/day/file-name format and save your changes.
8. Now you are ready to import. Click on TOOLS > IMPORT and choose WordPress. Select your exported XML file. WordPress will prompt you to select your author choice or choose a author to map or link to the new one. Remember to check the option “download and import file attachment” to have all your images imported as well.
9. Click Submit and everything from your old blog, including all your images, will be imported into your new blog domain.
10. WordPress will export everything from your old blog, expect your links or blogroll. To get your blogroll or links to your new wordpress blog, type the following URL in your browser
http://www.you-site.com/wp-links-opml.php
You will see a bunch of codes being displayed. Go to your new wordpress dashboard, click TOOLS > IMPORT, choose blogroll. Copy the URL earlier and paste in the “Specify an OPML URL” field. All your links from your old blog will be imported into your new blog.
11. Now you have 2 blogs having the same content. But user will still be visiting your old blog via links and search engines. We will need to re-direct your old blog to the new blog.
12. Go to your old blog’s dashboard, click on the UPGRADES > DOMAIN.
13. Add your new domain in the field provided and click “Add Domain to Blog”. Immediately after your add your URL, wordpress will tell you that there is an error and they cannot verify your URL. We will need to verify your new blog by directing the DNS server of your new blog to wordpress. Once this is verified, then you can subscribe to domain mapping from wordpress, which cost at $10 per year.
14. Go to your domain control panel, I am using Blue Host cpanel. Click on the Domain Manager tab, under the tab Name Server, change DNS names to the below following.
ns1.wordpress.com
ns2.wordpress.com
ns3.wordpress.com
15. Once the change is done, go back to wordpress, click on the Try Again button in the error box, or you can try to add the domain again. Once verified, wordpress will direct you to purchase the domain mapping at $10 per year. Choose to pay by using Palpal or credits card payment.
16. Once you have settle the domain mapping payment, from the dashboard, click DOMAIN. You can see your new domain in the the list of domains already. Choose your new URL domain and click on the “set as primary domain”.
17. One last thing to do before all re-directing is cool. Go to your domain control panel, I am using Blue Host cpanel. Click on the Domain Manager tab, under the tab Name Server, choose Use Default Nameservers, and WALA, you are ready to go with your new site.
However, the DNS change will take effect from few minutes to up to 48 hours. This means that if you go to your new blog, it will still load the old one.
For mine, I got worried when mine did not load the new site, so I Live Chat with Blue Host, the tech guy advised that the DNS will take from minutes to up to 48 hours to take effect. The support I felt was really good for Blue Host.
I waited for about 6 hours for mine.
