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