People often decide the time is right to move out of WordPress’ basement. Although it is free and easier to set up by using the free WordPress hosting, it does mean you are restricted in a few ways. You have less control over plugin usage,  and no control over hosting location (useful for SEO and geo targeting your blog) or domain and cc TLD or FTP access for up/downloading files.

However the good people at WordPress have made it really easy to move away, from your sub domain .wordpress.com to myfunkynewsite.co.uk.

How to Move WordPress

Step 1:

On your current WordPress blog/website login, and head into your admin area, clicking: Admin > Tools > Export

Save the export locally on your computer.

Step 2:

Buy your new hosting account and domain name. The best hosting companies will now make it very easy to install WordPress with a one click install. Well in fact it’s never one click, but it’s very straight forward now! Find the best WordPress host depending on your country/requirements.

Step 3:

When you have chosen your funkydomain.co.uk and have installed WordPress, you should see the basic Hello World post on the homepage. Login to your new admin area, click Tools > Import. Here you can import your previous WordPress export that should be saved on your local computer.

Step 4:

You should see all your posts, users, pages, and everything else fly in . Then it’s just a case of installing and configuring all your old plugins,  and have fun on the site which you are now fully in control of!

N.B. Check that your old images are correctly viewed on your new site. You may need to change the location of the images in the posts, with the images reuploaded to the new server via FTP. You may find it simpler to leave the old WordPress site live to be sure old images are still available, though this is not ideal for SEO – as you will have the site available in two locations.

Step 5:

Having move the site to your own hosting account and domain, set up the full redirection service offered by WordPress. This will forward visitors to your old blog t your new blog location, where you will add new posts to. WordPress do attach a small fee for this service, but it’s important if you don’t want to lose old readers.