Recipe for Migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Hello everyone! Be warned: this is a techie post, not a food post. That’s right – this post has absolutely nothing to do with food. But I’m hoping it might interest a food blogger or two… (If you stop reading right here, I understand!)

As you know, I recently migrated my blog from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. The process involved a whopping 7-8 hours of hard work because I’m really not much of a techie, and relevant information available online was scant. Since I’ve now passed through the fire and emerged victorious, I thought I should share my new found knowledge with those of you who are thinking of migrating your wordpress.com blogs, to spare you the pain of having to piece together the dribs and drabs of information you may dig up online.

First of all, why would anyone NOT want to migrate their blog from wordpress.com to wordpress.org? Because:

Blogs hosted on wordpress.com are free of charge. Blogs hosted elsewhere (and you will need to get an external host to use wordpress.org) are typically NOT free of charge.
Much of the functionality you will require for your blog is already built into the wordpress.com interface – I’m talking about stuff like site statistics and site/post sharing capabilities, just to name a few.

Sounds great? Yes it does.

So why would anyone – why would I – want to migrate my blog to a wordpress.org blog? Because:

You can then insert javascript anywhere into your blog. Why would you want to do that? Heaps of reasons. With java script you can include all kinds of animation, as well as dynamic notices and ads which you are not allowed to include on wordpress.com (see for example my Compassion ad on the right sidebar – the one that always shows current rather than static child information.)
You can modify your blog theme any way you like. On wordpress.com and most all free webhosts, you are pretty much stuck with the library of themes that you are presented. I love wordpress themes, which is why I went with wordpress in the first place. But sometimes I want to be able to make a certain column wider, or make a header bigger, or put in the cool cork background that I have created for this version of my blog. And migrating your blog to wordpress.org allows you to do that.

So anyway, it’s definitely not a clear cut choice to make, and I would advise that you be very sure before you attempt the migration. Even if you successfully migrate your blgo, some things might become a little wonky (e.g. Now if you look at some of my older posts, they all say I have zero comments even though that’s not true. That wasn’t supposed to happen during the migration, but it did.)

Ok enough with the caveats! Here is Mrs Multitasker’s recipe for migrating your blog from wordpress.com to wordpress.org.

Ingredients (serves all your readers!):

A wordpress.com blog (e.g. www.mrsmultitasker.wordpress.com).
A unique non-wordpress.com domain name (e.g. www.mrsmultitasker.com) that was already linked to your wordpress.com blog. (I’m not too sure what the precise steps are if you have been using the wordpress.com url. I think they’ll be similar to what i have below, but simpler.)
A credit card.
Time and patience.

Directions:

1. First make sure you take some screen shots of parts of your blog – JUST IN CASE you have trouble accessing your old blog after the migraiton. When you migrate your blog, all your posts, tags and comments will be transported over, but your blog links, widgets and statistics will not. So it’s good to have screen shots of whatever is of importance or sentimental value to you. Everything should still be available on your wordpress.com blog, but I had trouble accessing mine for a little while after the migration, so you should do this just in case.

2. Under Tools, select Export and export your entire blog to an XML file. You can either export it to several files according to date, or to one big file. If you are very jittery about the whole process, I would recommend that you do both. No harm having those extra XML files sitting on your hard drive.

3. Now you can go looking for your blog host. You can find some WordPress friendly hosts here. When you register with your blog host, you will be required to enter your credit card info for payment after the trial period. You will be asked to enter in your blog address. Enter in your non-Wordpress.com domain name. When you’ve finished registering, you will receive numerous emails from your host.

4. On the wordpress.com admin site, under Upgrades, select Domains. Generate a password to go to your domain administration website. At that site, you will need to change your name server(s) to whatever is specified in the emails you received from your new blog host.

5. Your blog host should also advise you how to get hold of some FTP programme. Do that,  and get the FTP programme linked to your blog.

6. If you picked from the list of hosts I linked in step 3, your blog host should also allow you to auto-install wordpress.org software. Go install your software. On my host I installed the easy software at first, only to discover that the small upload capacity wouldn’t allow me to import the XML that I had exported from wordpress.com. So I had to uninstall it and install the advanced software instead.  So much trouble! Try to find out what the upload capacity for the various softwares is beforehand.

7. Once that’s all done (you’ve got your blog host, you’ve changed your domain name servers, you’ve got your FTP programme, and you’ve installed the wordpress.org software), you’re ready to import your blog into wordpress.org! Login to your new wordpress site, go to Tools, and click on Import. Select WordPress, then upload your xml file. Follow the instructions from there. Sadly my import process was not smooth and I had to import the same file about 12 times (YES 12 TIMES!) before my entire blog was imported over. But hey, it got done in the end…

8. If anything at all is troubling you, contact wordpress support here. (They’re real nice and pretty efficient.)

9. Have fun with your new blog!

Hope this is helpful for some people, if not now then in the future.

May I never have to write another techie post ever again!