Making the Move: How to Transfer Your Blog to Self-Hosting

[Update:  So many people have emailed me to tell me how much this post helped them that I decided to give it its own page.  Check out the new, updated version.]

First, thank you for all your encouragement on the first day of this blog.  Starting a new blog is always a little scary (what if they don't like it?), and it's so great to know that people are interested in what I have to share.  I owe a huge thank-you to Caitlin from Healthy Tipping Point, for announcing this new idea to her many readers to help me get it off the ground.

I said I wasn't going to post every single day, but you all seemed so anxious to learn how to move your blogs to self-hosting that I couldn't resist.  So let's get right to it.

Important: In what follows, I'm assuming your self-hosted blog will be a WordPress blog.  Though rare, I believe it's possible to self-host with Blogger, but there's not much reason to.  The main advantage of self-hosting, from my perspective, is access to the thousands of WordPress plugins that help with everything from layout and design to search engine optimization.  Those plugins aren't available for Blogger blogs.  If you're a Blogger user, you have two options.  Scan to the bottom of this post and see my "Note to Blogger Users," or not worry about self-hosting at all and just consider mapping a custom domain name to your current blog.

How to Move Your WordPress Blog to Self-Hosting

Sign Up with a Host

1. Click "Sign Up Now" at your chosen host's website. I chose to host this blog on Bluehost (affiliate link!) because they have a good reputation and the ability to one-click install WordPress, rather than having to first download it to your computer then back up to the server.  This extra step is pretty involved and took me a couple days the first time I did it, so the one-click install option was a must for me.  The rest of these steps are specific to Bluehost, but if you decide to use another company, you can probably still figure out what to do from these steps.
2. In the "I Need a Domain" option, fill in your DESIRED domain name. NOT your ".wordpress" name.  You don't need to put in the "http://www." part either.  Choose the ".com" extension, unless you have a good reason not to.
3. Assuming your domain name is available, you'll be asked to fill in your billing information. With this kind of stuff, it's good practice to make your passwords very complicated.  Note that you have to pay for the full year of hosting up front.
   
4. Once your account is active, login to Bluehost and go to the Bluehost Control Panel (cPanel).
   
5. Near the bottom of the page, in the "Software/Services" section, click the WordPress icon.
6. Click the green "Install" button under "Install on an Existing Server."
7. In the box under "Where would you like WordPress installed?" your domain name should appear. If there's any chance you will ever want to create a website to accompany your blog, you may want to consider typing "blog" in the box on the right.  For example, I decided to locate this blog at http://www.healthbloghelper.com/blog.  Once you're finished, it's very easy to setup a redirect so that traffic to http://www.sampleblogname.com is sent to http://www.sampleblogname.com/blog, like I did with this site.
8. Read the legal information, and if you agree, check the box and complete the install.  (You don't need to worry about "Advanced Options" now.)

Congratulations!  At this point, you have your own domain name and hosting, and WordPress is installed somewhere on the domain.  You'll receive an email telling you your temporary username and password, and where to go to login to the good old WordPress dashboard.

Exporting and Importing the Old Blog

Now all that's left to do is transfer your old blog.  To do it:

1. Login to your OLD blog, at WordPress.com.
2. From the Dashboard, on the left, click "Tools." Under that, click "Export."
3. Choose "All Authors" in the dropdown box, and click "Download Export File."
4. Save the file in place where you'll be able to find it.
5. Login to your NEW blog.
6. From the Dashboard, on the left, click "Tools." Under that, click "Import."
   
7. In the list of choices, click "WordPress."
8. Find the file using "Browse," then click "Upload file and import."
9. When you are asked to map authors, decide whether you want everything from your old blog to be under a single author name, or if you want multiple author names. In either case, you'll need to create new users, which you can do in your new blog's Dashboard.

[Update: I just talked to Holly, who recently went through this process (it's been a while for me).  She told me that during step 9, there is an option asking something like "Do you want to include attachments?"  When she checked the box next to it, the transfer froze at some point.  When she tried again without checking the box, everything worked fine, and all photos and everything made it to her new blog.  You might want to try checking the box first, and unchecking it if there's a problem.]

[Update 2: I just got an email from Rachel, who said the transfer went great.  But when she tried to find her old theme to use on her new blog, it wasn't in the WordPress directory.  She found it by doing a Google search.  If you're intent on keeping your theme the same, make sure you can find it available for download before signing up for hosting, just in case it's not in the WordPress directory.]

[Update 3: If the export/import file that's created is larger than 2 megabytes (if your blog is big), you'll get an error saying it's too large when you try to import.  Before you pay for hosting, you can check to see if you'll have this problem by following the instructions to create the export file and seeing how large it is.  But even if it's larger than 2 megabytes, it seems to be an easy fix.  Hellie had this problem and the hosting company support was able to fix it quickly by changing a few lines of code to allow larger file sizes.  See my comment #17 on this post for more details about what to tell them.]

The actual importing may take a while, depending on how much content you have on your blog.  When I did it, I had only been blogging for two weeks, so it was very quick.  Holly, who did it after about five months of blogging, said it took much longer to complete the import.

You're done!  Welcome to your new blog.  On your old blog, you'll probably want to write a new post that very clearly links readers to the new blog.  It's advisable NOT TO DELETE YOUR OLD BLOG, because spammers might take the space and use it for whatever it is they do.  When I moved to self-hosting, I went back and linked each post on the old blog to its counterpart on the new blog.  I even changed the blog name to "This blog has moved" with the new url in the tagline, but this is probably overkill.  I eventually deleted my old posts from WordPress.com, but not the actual blog.

If you encounter any questions along the way, so feel free to email me at healthbloghelper@gmail.com, or Twitter me at @NoMeatAthlete.  I'll be happy to help you.  When in doubt, go to wordpress.org and type your question in the search box.  They have great support pages.  The thing to remember is that there's no reason to panic over anything, because your old blog will be undisturbed during all of this.  If anything is delayed, you can keep on blogging there until it gets resolved.

Finally, there are a few plugins you'll probably want to get right away, like "Login Lockdown" and "WordPress.com Stats." If you notice that there are some widgets that you used to have on WordPress.com but no longer have, chances are there's a plugin you can download for them.  I'll do a post on recommended plugins in the future.  In the meantime, if you can't figure out how to download the plugins, check wordpress.org or send me an email and I'll be happy to point you in the right direction.

[Update: Once you're happy with the appearance of your new blog, send me a link so we can show everyone how nice it looks!]

Note To Blogger Users

I'll (probably) only do this once, but if you use Blogger, I'm going to make an appeal for you to consider switching to WordPress.  Maybe I'm a little biased, since I've only used WordPress, but I believe that whatever user-friendliness you give up with WordPress is far outweighed by the flexibility to customize your blog that it allows.  As evidence of this, consider how similar all the Blogger blogs look, versus all the different WordPress themes you see.  Yes, a large portion of blogs are on Blogger.  But the portion of successful Blogger blogs is much smaller.  Take a look for yourself.  Of course, it's still possible to have an extremely successful Blogger blog, like the aforementioned Healthy Tipping Point.

You can transfer your Blogger blog to self-hosted WordPress with only a few more steps than importing a WordPress.com blog, and there are tutorials with specific instructions, like this one.  I've never done it (since I don't use Blogger), but it looks like the biggest issue is that you will have to upload all of your images again, since they won't transfer automatically.

Even if you decide not to switch to WordPress, don't worry, you can still get a lot of good information from this blog.  Some of the search engine optimization things will be more difficult with Blogger, but you can still do 95% of it.

Next Post

For my next post, I'll get away from the techie stuff for a while and talk about something that changed the way I look at blogging and has helped me tremendously—what I call the Homerun Post.  Hint: it's not about what you had for lunch.