How To Move Your Contents From Wordpress

Welcome back!! In our previous article, I explained why You should use WordPress.org for monetizing your blog.

In this Article, I will explain how you can move your contents from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, if you don’t know why you should use not Use WordPress.com, then I suggest you refer back to the earlier post.

The first step, as I mentioned earlier, wordpress.org requires you to have a host, so please go sign up for a host, Bluehost is a great starting point.

You can also use GoDaddy which is very similar, and good for small blogs but when You start to get around 30,000+ page views monthly, then you have to switch to something bigger, and a lot more expensive, but when you are starting, or have a relatively small blog go ahead and start with something like Bluehost (It is really not expensive, about $4 a month).

Now if you paid an upcharge on wordpress.com, you likely were able to get your own custom domain that does not have “.WordPress” in it, if you have done that you can use the same domain, that will transfer over just fine, if you haven’t done that, you are going to want to get your own domain.

You can again go through DomainKing, and get a custom domain name for as low as $2. A domain name is important because you don’t want your domain to end with Wordpress.com (i.e. “yourname.wordpress.com”), so you need your own domain, again, that is one of the big reasons of switching.

Now if you have paid the upcharge, and have gotten your own domain and use it on wordpress.com, please reading till the end, because I will talk about how you will redirect it to your new host. you don't Want to miss that point.

All right, now you have your host, and you have your domain. Now, you need to go back to your wordpress.com dashboard, and export everything that your blog has, this is why it is so much easier to do if you do it early in your blogging career. I have seen people wait three, four years to do it, and wow they have a lot of data to export. But even then, it can be done, it just takes a little bit more time.

So go to wordpress.com, go into your admin tab, and you will see an option to export, hit that button and it is going to automatically export all of your stuff from your blog into a folder on your computer, just pay attention to where that file goes, because you are going to need it later.

All right, next step, go back to wordpress.org, you have got your domain, and your host, now you are going to open WordPress in wordpress.org on your new host. Most of the hosts that I earlier have talked about automatically have WordPress downloaded in it, and if you have chosen a host that doesn’t, all you need to do is download WordPress, it’s a very easy, no problem.

But if you are with Bluehost or GoDaddy, it will already be there. Go to your wordpress.org, your admin dashboard, and instead of hitting export, you hit import, now there is a checkbox that is super important on the import box, and it inquires you “if you want to add your Media Files”. In order to have everything come over exactly the way you had it in your previous blog, please ensure to check that box. It will make the import take a little bit more time but you definitely Want to do that, do not skip that.

That is fundamentally how you get your blog from wordpress.com to wordpress.org.

Now there are a couple more things you might want to do, you can go through your new host and your new WordPress and pick a new theme if you Want to do that, and make something that is going to fit, or actually, have a lot more flexibility for you than anything that was available for wordpress.com (CHECK OUT BEST THEMES FOR ADSENSE) and lastly, very important, and this is the part I kept insisting you should wait for, wait till the end.

You need to redirect your blog from landing on wordpress.com, over to wordpress.org, this will cost you just a little bit of money but it is very important to do because you probably are already ranking in Google on some of your pages, you don't Want to lose your Google ranking.

Go to your wordpress.com, go into admins, and there is a tab to redirect, click on it and there is a box to fill in your new URL, and you should put your URL there, now wordpress.com will charge you about $13 per year, that is the price at the time of writing this Article.