Redirect Your WordPress.com Blog to Your Self-hosted Blog Easier Than Ever

WordPress.com is a great place to get started blogging. You can get a free blog with all of WordPress’ great features, themes, and support without having to deal with hosting and the frustrations of keeping your own site secure and updated. However, if your blog grows and you decide to take it to the next level, you’ll likely want to move on to running your own site self-hosted on your own hosting account or servers. If you were blogging at WordPress.com with your own domain (yourname.com), then it’s very easy to move: just import your export file from WordPress.com, redirect your domain, and you’re all set.

However, if you were blogging with a WordPress.com domain (yourname.WordPress.com), it’s a bit trickier to move. You can still just import all of your old posts, but any links to your blog will be dead and you’ll lose much of the traffic you previously had. If you don’t want this to happen, you’ll need to redirect your WordPress.com links to your new blog. Used to, this was very difficult. You had to add your domain to WordPress.com, which itself was a difficult task, then go change your CNAME records back to your new hosting account. With the delays in DNS propagation, it could often mean your site was more or less offline for a full day. That’s no fun!

The New, Easy WordPress.com Redirect

This past year, WordPress.com added a brand new Offsite Redirect upgrade option that makes it much easier than before to redirect all of your old WordPress.com traffic to your new self-hosted blog. Your site won’t be offline at all during any of the process, and it’ll actually take less than 5 minutes to get it redirected. Plus, your old links will be HTTP 301 redirected, which will make search engines pick up on your new links and not keep your old site’s links around.

Ready to get started? To redirect your blog, just login to your WordPress.com dashboard and open the Upgrades page from the left-hand menu.

You’ll find the Site Redirect upgrade option near the bottom of the page. You can read more about the upgrade, or just click Buy Now to get started redirecting your WordPress.com blog to your new domain.

Enter the domain name you want to redirect your site to, then confirm that you entered the site correctly.

Now, just select whether you want to pay directly with your credit card or through your PayPal account.

Enter your payment info or login to your PayPal account, and then authorize and complete the transaction.

As soon as your payment goes through, you’ll see your new domain listed on your Domains page. Unlike the old domain redirect hack, this method will actually show that this domain is for a site redirect. If for some reason you decide to switch to a different domain, you can change the redirect domain from this page as well. You can also enable Auto Renew so you won’t have to remember to authorize the payment again every year.

Now, just try visiting your old WordPress.com domain. It should immediately redirect to the new domain you added. It’s that easy!

Adding the New Redirect After Using the Old Redirect

If you had previously setup your WordPress.com blog to redirect by manually adding your domain and then changing the CNAME records, you could just keep paying for your Domain Mapping upgrade every year, and it’ll continue working the same. However, it’s the same price to redirect, so I decided to switch my site to the new redirect. There’s only one problem: you can’t add a redirect to a domain you already have mapped to your account. If you try to add one, you’ll see an error like the one below.

If your domain mapping is almost ready for renewal, you could go ahead and remove the old mapping, then add the new site redirect. Just scroll down on the Domains page, choose your old yourname.wordpress.com domain as the primary one, then delete your domain mapping. Once this is done, you can add your new Domain Forwarding as above.

Conclusion

WordPress is one of the most versatile blogging and CMS systems, and I’m certain that the free WordPress.com blogs have gotten many people (such as myself!) started using WordPress over other similar tools. Now that it’s so easy to redirect your old blogs, there’s really no major difficulty to moving your blog to a self-hosted setup if you wish. And, hey, if you ever decide that managing your own hosting is too difficult, you could go back to WordPress.com just as easily and add your domain there. The choice is yours, and that’s how it ought to be!

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