Making the Switch: Moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

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Moving to a self-hosted WordPress.ORG installation is a big step up in most cases. If you’re coming from a WordPress.COM site, there is some good news and some bad news for you.

Good News

It’s super easy to transfer your content.
You’re familiar with most of your site already!
You can keep your followers.

Bad News

Keeping your SEO comes at a price.

Transferring your content

Moving your content from your .COM to your .ORG is as easy as going to “Tools > Export” then “Tools > Import” which is explained in some more detail at WordPress.com.

Not losing your followers and stats

WordPress.ORG also has a follow feature, which can be activated by installing their “Jetpack” plugin. After doing this, you just need to post in the forums what your old URL is and what your new URL is, and a staff member will transfer these for you. Here’s an example forum post.

Keeping your SEO

In order to continue receiving traffic from your old site’s rankings, you need to redirect your old site to your new one, using 301 redirects (which tells search engines that the URL change in permanent). With Blogger migrations, there are plugins that can handle this. With WordPress, however, you need to buy an annual subscription for about $13.

Pretty easy, overall

As you can see, the process of moving your content, stats, and followers is pretty easy! Getting your site’s functionality running is the next step. You’ll want to do some research on which plugins are the best to have (keeping in mind that you don’t want too many plugins) and find yourself a nice theme.