My site has now moved from wordpress.com and I am now self-hosting with wordpress.org. The move has been hard work, and, at the time of writing this post, my domain name has yet to move across from my old wordpress.com site over to this one.
I have learnt a few things, which I will share for any other bloggers who are interested in making the switch over to self-hosted!
Table of Contents
Self-hosting with WordPress does not mean that you lose followers!
I was worried that moving over from WordPress.com would mean that those that followed me and used to visit my blog often would no longer be able to follow me from their WordPress reader. Apparently, this is not the case. Please let me know if you can still see me in your readers!
If you are thinking of moving to a self-hosted site, and you do not want to lose your followers, you can retain them as long as you use the Jetpack plugin. You will need to log in using the same credentials as your WordPress.com site. From there you can use a subscription migration tool to switch your subscribers over to your new site.
Unfortunately for me, this tool did not work. There were options missing from my Jetpack menu. However, I emailed WordPress support. They moved you all onto my new site for me very quickly! (Thanks WordPress!)
Switching to self-hosting may mean that I cannot acquire followers in the same way that I previously have done. Many of my followers came to me through tags in WordPress reader. It is my understanding that this won’t be the case anymore. So, if I want to grow my readership within the walls of WordPress, I will have to interact more.
However, with greater control over my Search Engine Optimization through plugins like Yoast, I should be able to extend my reach and grow my readership.
Self-hosting with WordPress offers a world of plugin opportunities
The best thing about self-hosting is the ability to install plugins. If you pay for the more expensive plans on wordpress.com, you can obviously get these over there. But you can install whatever you like on your self-hosted site.
Self-hosting means taking care of your own security! I’ve installed protection, although I’m going to monitor and see whether I need more.
Yoast is an essential tool to install if you are going self-hosted. While I write this post, I can see a set of traffic light colours below that are telling me how readable this post is. (I am currently writing in an active style with a Flesch Reading Ease score of 71.4- which means this is easy to read!) More significantly, Yoast gives you information about how well your posts are optimized for search engines to find. Are your posts long enough? Do they have backlinks? Is there a keyphrase defined, and does this feature throughout the text and in titles? And, have you created a meta description for the content?
What I have learnt from looking at my older posts is that my SEO was a little off in places. I will be slowly revisiting them over the next few weeks and months to tweak older posts. I must make sure I please the Google search bots!
There are plugins galore available, and I will be adding plenty more to the site as I develop it.
Import hell- How I nearly lost all of my images!
If you are considering moving to a self-hosted version of WordPress, be prepared for exporting and importing headaches.
I may have made mistakes or used an inadequate tool. Or, it may have been something to do with my specific website. However, I had some real headaches importing all of my content over. The first attempt only saw 4 posts from 2010 moving over. I tried again. Repeatedly. I made over 20 attempts at exporting my old data and then importing it onto here. Every attempt brought a new trickle of data across.
The images took the most work to bring over. In the end, I had to just export one month’s worth of photos at a time.
However, I still have a problem because many of my posts are missing their featured images. That means, revisiting each post and re-inserting the image.
Are you thinking of going self-hosted?
If you are either in the process of moving over, or you are thinking of self-hosting with WordPress, what are your experiences and concerns?
Image by Werner Moser from Pixabay
Glad you made the jump bro, best to make that jump when blogging becomes a profession or an extension of a profession. For me i think it will always be a hobby, i self hosted years back but heading into my 50’s i dont want the tech headache i endured in my 30’s all the power to ya.
The link does not work for me 😟
Yup. Not sure what’s happened. My domain seems to have switched over today to the new site, but it’s all gone terribly wrong. When I posted this earlier, my site was using a temporary URL and was working. Working out how to fix it! Eek.
Starting up troubles… you’ll find it out and I’ll come back to have a look!
It’s up now! Some of the nameservers had not fully moved over. Apparently they had updated in some countries but not others.
hum worked for me this morning , seems wp didn’t post my comment
works again now 🙂 I can see your comment. It’s in my approval stack 🙂
It works! It seems like a lot of work in the beginning to figure everything out and to import all of your images. But once set up, I think it will work out fine.
I think everything is pretty much sorted now. Woo 🙂 I’m going to go through each post and page on here one-by-one and check them all over time. I’ve lost every ‘like’ from the old site. But that doesn’t matter too much!