Moving a blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted site might seem like a walk in the park, but it’s anything but. T
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Moving A Domain Name Is Stressful
So, I already owned this domain name when I used wordpress.com. But, obviously, I wanted to take it with me.
Moving my blog’s domain name took effort and stress. It takes 5-7 days to update name servers, during which time I was assigned a temporary URL. The problem with updating name servers is that it doesn’t happen all at once. Some of my readers reported issues viewing my posts immediately after the switch, while others saw the site fine. Different parts of the world will update at different rates.
I have a sneaky suspicion that the post that went up at this time is still directing to the temp UR whenever anyone attempts to view it in WordPress reader, which is now redundant and will result in a 404.
You Lose Your Likes
So, when I moved across, unfortunately, all of my posts lost their likes. While likes are not the be-all-and-end-all, it is a bit sad to have lost that metric of how popular each post was. And, because older posts won’t get as much attention anymore, I guess it is unlikely that they will ever see likes again!
I believe this is not a fault, but a side effect of the move.
Jetpack And WordPress Reader
Many of my page views used to come from WordPress Reader, and while I am still seeing a reasonable degree of traffic, these are coming from social media, search engines, and other sources. These have risen, but the core of my traffic used to come from within WordPress in the past.
From what I understand, posts from WordPress.org are slow coming through to the reader. They will also not appear in searches for tags unless I upgrade my Jetpack subscription.
I am also unsure what exactly is even making it to WordPress Reader.
You Lose Your Stats
I had ten years’ worth of stats on this site. Granted, they were pretty low. But moving across, you do lose all of your historic site data. However, the trade-off is that I have better current stat information with in built Google Analytics and Google Search Console. So, there is no running around trying to piece all of this information from elsewhere.
The future is what matters most!
Followers And Subscribers
So, now, when anyone follows my blog, they become a subscriber and appear in a separate list which does not seem to get included in the follower stats that appear in the subscription box. Weird, huh? In fact, the only way of finding out my subscriber stats is to actually go into the subscriber list and see. The subscriber list is under “team”, which is a bit odd. Not sure if I am looking at this right.
Security
The only thing I am going to say about site security is, that after installing my own security plugins, it is really staggering to see the stats on how many times each day the website comes under attack. If you are making a switch, get yourself a good security plugin!
Blog Migration Is a Learning Curve
I am still glad I have made the change. I am hoping that I can find my way back to building up the reader connections that I had on wordpress.com, however, I still feel as though all of the additional functions will help the site in the long run. I’m sure there are still going to be more lessons from blog migration yet to come!
Have you ever made the switch? What were your experiences of blog migration? Have you got any tips?
Image by Kevin Phillips from Pixabay
Well, I’m not an expert, but my thought is that my host is SiteGround and I think they handle all my security issues. I may be wrong, but I also have Jetpack so that is my backup I guess. I should really look at my blogs and make sure it’s all covered!
I know with Bluehost, it’s possible to pay extra to get security. Jetpack has some security, which again you can pay to upgrade. I’ve downloaded the wordfence plugin which runs scans every day. There’s loads of free plugins though !
God this all sounds so complicated, I want to cry! Been taking a couple of weeks off actually writing, trying to learn how to operate WordPress properly, learn about SEO and all that stuff… How did you learn how to do it all? I feel like I am not naturally good at the tech but I need to get better at it to build readership.
I have to Google so many things. Every problem that springs up, I’m trying to find other people who have had that problem too and reading what I can. I knew quite a bit about SEO before starting (having written countless articles) but getting the Yoast plugin has really helped with upping my game! If you’ve never used it, it has a traffic light system that lets you know exactly what you need to do to your posts to make them as Google friendly as possible! So far I’ve optemized about five percent of this site. It’s gonna mean tweaking all my older posts to get it how I want it!!
Can you still use plugins on your self hosted site? 😫 It’s so confusing, feels like nuclear physics to me… or maths. I will just have to methodically try to learn how to do it all!
Self hosted is pretty much the same as using WordPress.com. the dashboard is laid out the same but you can add plugins for free instead of paying to upgrade your plan. Essentially you can all of the same stuff on .com, but it will cost you lots more. I think I pay £15 a year for my domain name and £25ish for my hosting fees, whereas it would cost hundreds on .com
Hi Peter, sounds like you’re over the hump of it. I wasn’t aware of the likes/stats issues so thats well worth knowing.
The DNS propagation issues are always a nightmare. It’s down to each record having a time to live (how long they can be cached) before the name is looked up for the IP number. i.e. if you’re TTL is a week, then various DNS servers can use the cached IP lookup for up to seven days before having to look it up again. The side effect of this is it always penalises the people who use your site the most (i.e. have visited recently and cached the old IP). While complete strangers to the site will often pickup the new IP straight off. It’s always patchy. On the security front, as you’re seeing it’s scary how many attacks you get a day. On my sites the attacks outweigh legit traffic 10 to 1. Make sure you’ve got regular automated backups in place – I can’t emphasis this one enough. You’ll need to make sure they work and that you have many of them (weeks/months). I wrote an article on security and the importance of backups last year after 3 of my WordPress site’s were hacked. Might be useful … http://mused.blog/2019/08/25/hacked-guide/ Good luck and I hope it’s plain sailing from here on it 😉
Ah. This will explain why I’m still finding people are having problems even after all the nameservers switched. Hopefully it’ll start picking up.
I’m wondering whether much of my traffic these days is spam. I can see a few visitors coming from social media and search engines, and a very small amount coming from wordpress reader, but it doesn’t account for even half of my traffic. And much of my traffic has a very high bounce rate. I’m also seeing fake subscribers appearing on my list.
Cheers for all your advice!!
I had my first fake subscriber the other day – woot 😉 Not had one for the first 18 months (<100 subscribers). I get a lot of bots (80% of these come from China, Ukraine and oddly Finland for some reason):
1) Send spam through any contact forms (even with captcha).
2) Send spam through comments usually with bogus links
3) SEO trawlers that detect and create links to any new content (i.e. link building), this one is annoying as it can be mitigated easily and could effect my SEO ranking if/when they get penalised.
4) bots scanning for known weaknesses to hijack the site.
5) inevitable attempts to login using random usernames/passwords (brute force nonsense) – obviously all accounts have multi-factor auth so it’s never going to work.
The last two is where a good proactive security plugin really helps. In my experience 75% of organic traffic bounces in seconds (be it a blog / services / product) seems to be par for the course. Don’t get me started on the drop off rates from social media – you can literally see the users going “errrr words!” 😉
I’m shocked. I had about twelve in the first day or two. I felt really popular until I looked at the names and email addresses and realized they probably were not legit! I’m not sure what to do about them or how I’ve even attracted them so quickly.
Wow! Thank you because this is something I’ve been contemplating doing.
It’s been a couple of weeks now and I’m still tweaking. I think it’s a worthwhile move to make in the long term, however, prepare yourself for some hard-work and head sratching in the short term! Give me a shout if you need any advice!
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