My Journey Moving from WordPress.com to my Own Domain – The Best Plugins for Getting Started
If you’re reading this then you are on my new blog domain! My journey as a blogger, while fairly brief, has been pretty eventful. I started in August by using the built in software in Bloglines. I pretty much held my nose and jumped in using the first tool at hand. After a week, though, I realized I needed something more robust and so moved to a blog on WordPress.com.
This time I did a little research before hand. I wasn’t ready to spend the money on a private domain or the time to learn how to install and administer software. WordPress was clearly the best reviewed service, so I started blogging at sllarsen.wordpress.com (the original Flying Cloud).
Note: If you’ve read my about page you know that I am a VP at Northern Light (a purveyor of custom research portals and search software). Northern Light is named after a clipper ship. The sister ship to the Northern Light was the Flying Cloud. Ta da!
I couldn’t figure out how to get my original posts from Bloglines into WordPress.com, but they were “experimental” (shall we say). I was able to create a very nice site if I do say so myself – and I didn’t, thanks, Kyle!
I was very happy on WordPress.com for several months until I realized how difficult/impossible it is do any advanced usage tracking or to leverage social media plugins. Also, I am working on developing an blogging program at Northern Light and clearly we would need to use installed blogging software on our own servers using our own domains.
Since my current hosting service for my personal website/email was about to expire, I looked around for a new host that would be 1) cheaper and 2) able to easily work with WordPress software. I went with AN Hosting after reading several reviews and because of their program to support WordPress. I also bought a new domain – sherilarsen.com. Once I figured out my various account logins, I was able to use Fantastico from my cpanel administration site to install WordPress in about 30 seconds.
In less than 36 hours I had my new site up and all my posts imported from my WordPress.com site. All I had to do was export my posts from one and import them into the other. Of course now I have two parallel sites. I had built a small but hard won following on sllarsen.wordpress.com that I want to migrate to sherilarsen.com, but that is not so easy. I can find no way to seamlessly redirect a person from a post on one domain to the same post on the other.
My solution was to create a new post on sllarsen.wordpress.com announcing my my domain, remove all the widgets from the site, replace to delete all least popular posts from sllarsen.wordpress.com completely. For the popular ones I put links in referring readers to the versions on my new domain. I spent a lot of time looking for ways to automatically redirect, but couldn’t find anything that works with WordPress.com.
My new tasks is to find all the places online that refer to my sllarsen.wordpress.com and replace it with sherilarsen.com. I keep finding them!
I did a lot of research on helpful plugins for a new WordPress blog and here’s the list I’ve installed so far:
- What Would Seth Godin Do – shows a welcome box to new visitors
- All in One SEO Pack – adds titles, keywords and descriptions to the metadata of your posts
- del.icio.us for WordPress – creates a headlines list of my Delicious bookmarks. I have it limited to just bookmarks I tag with “postthis.” Can also create a daily post from Delicious links – but I have not turned it on yet.
- Postalicious – creates a post from your Delicious links. I have it set to create a draft to see if it will help make my semi-weekly link post easier to create.
- Delicatessen – for seeing who’s linking to my posts in Delicious
- ShareThis – social bookmarking from each post – although I am thinking of trying Sociable to see the difference.
- MyBlogLog Widget – shows my recent readers
- Twitter Tools – shows my Tweets in the sidebar, creates a blog post from my daily tweets, creates a tweet when I post a blog entry
- Evermore – truncates my posts on the home page to no more than 3 paragraphs (this can be changed in the settings)
- Google XML Sitemaps – for automatically creating and updating a sitemap for Google to use when crawling
- Google Analytics – for usage tracking from Google
- FeedBurner FeedSmith – for managing my RSS feeds
- One-click Installer – installs any plugin or theme without having to upload them manually via ftp. Can also delete theme and plugin folders.
- Adsense-Deluxe – I signed up for Adsense just to see how it works these days, but I can’t get this plugin to work.
- WordPress Database Backup – on-demand backup of your WordPress database.
- WordPress Reports – generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data on a tab inside the WordPress administration
I also installed the Lijit search “wijit”. Let’s readers search not just your blog posts, but also the content of your other social media profiles (like your Delicious and Digg links and your Linkedin and Facebook profiles. Cool!
If you have some questions or need help with moving from WordPress.com to a hosted domain – I’d be happy to help as much as I can. Just leave me a comment or email me at sheri at sherilarsen dot com.
Great Post! Thanks for these great word press plugins, they were really helpful.
excellent post. wordpress is good but can be quite rigid. the plugin tips really help.
Thanks for the good article..
Did your way succeeded in transferring all your user hits to the new domain?
or you still losing some ?
@hisham – Thanks for the feedback. I did lose some subscribers and traffic initially, but after a few weeks I was back up to where I had been.
~Sheri
I was wondering if you knew whether I have to host my wordpress blog somewhere else, or can I just register a domain and still let wordpress host it? I want to have a unique URL (www.jmartsroom.com vs. jmartsroom.wordpress.com) without hosting somewhere else.
If you could help, I’d appreciate it.
Jarrod
Hi, Jarrod
I couldn’t figure out how to make WordPress host this blog with my own URL so I chose a web hosting company with good support for WordPress installations (AN Hosting). Once my account was set up with AN Hosting I used Fantastico in Cpanel to install WordPress. It took just a few minutes to install. After that the administration of the blog is pretty much exactly like it was on WordPress.com.
Hope that helps!
Hey Sheri,
Nice post, you are the only one giving me hope. See you moved quickly from bloglines to wordpress. My problem is, have been with bloglines for 2 years now and have substantial number of posts…have recently realised that I need to move out to, say wordpress. I still can’t figure how to import all my posts. Friends have told me, copying each one into blogger and then importing from blogger.
I am sure there’s a smarter way. Do you have it.
Many thanks in advance. Do mail me on sudarban@gmail.com to let me know in case you have it figured.
regards
Sudarshan
Hey,
My Name is, Robert
nice overall content
my site:
http://7BsXJZEi3K.spaces.live.com/
Thank you for this information.
Great move, I think a wordpress hosted blog should be just for a company side-project, else get your own domain
Hello I am just looking around many different websites that offer domain names. Well this is rediculous on how many people out there charge you for so many items that don’t need to be bought and still get the same quality as the paid for sites. I have found out that all you need to really pay out is max $10 year and no more for any product on domain names. And you can get free hosting, website design programs, free personalized emails, free blog account, and free online picture site. ALL WITH A $10 PAYMENT. So don’t waste your time on paying anymore for what you need unless you are running a huge website. And still it shouldn’t cost more than $89.00 Year. By the way if the Blog owner lets me post this I have settled down with http://www.rnrstuff.net. But there are other like this site here that seem real nice. But Beware the Domain BIZ is still very young and it is still got alot of growing so get it while its young.
great post, why are the comments above being encrypted?
Spam!! All the (now deleted) comments were in Russian.