How to Transfer a WordPress.com Blog to Self Hosted WordPress?

If you want to move or transfer your blog from a wordpress.com blog to a self hosted WordPress blog and use the world’s most popular blogging platform by wordpress.org then you must go through this blog post on how to transfer a wordpress.com blog to self hosted WordPress.

Those who are a regular visitor of my blog must aware that I am publishing a few blogs from different types of blog to how to install WordPress and how to interchange the blogging platforms, etc. I explained these things earlier:

Different Types of Blogs a Blogger Can Have!
How to Move Blogspot Blog to Your Own Domain Name?
How to Get a Customized Domain Name for WordPress.com Blogs?
How to Transfer Your Blogger Blog to Self Hosted WordPress Blog?

To continue with the same sequence, I thought to write about how we can transfer our blog to self hosted WordPress blog from a free wordpress.com blog. As we all know that WordPress provides us two options, one being the free one with wordpress.com extension and other being the self hosted one which comes from WordPress.org site.

To be very frank, though I was planning to write on this topic but today only I came through the comments of one of the readers of my blog Vandana Singhal asking about the same. Here is the link to her comment and the content of her comment:

“Hi Alok,
Thanks for sharing this information. But I need your help to solve my query. I have a blog on free wordpress platform. I want to transfer it to my self hosted word press blog. Please guide me how to do it. Will it follow same process as you explained in this post?”

So as I responded back to her that I will publish the blog on her question so here is the same post.

How to Transfer a WordPress.com Blog to Self Hosted WordPress?

If you already have a free wordpress.com blog and want to shift it to self hosted WordPress blog then these are the steps which you need to do:

Get a Web Hosting

Self hosted blogs require a supportive web hosting along with your domain name. As I mentioned the essential requirements of web hosting for a WordPress blog in my recent blog on how to install WordPress, you can easily be able to get a better plan for your blog. Though some things are there which you need to take care of while purchasing a web hosting plan, the most important is that the hosting should be purchased from a reliable service provider only, which has the best customer support and turnaround time and a better uptime. Always remember that the performance of hosting service provider is something which can give the better loading time for your blog, which is very much important these days for the SEO of your site.

Through all the experiences which I had during last few years, I can recommend HostGator for hosting WordPress sites.

The best thing which I like about Hostgator is that their post sales support is magnificent. They always help their customers at the most convenient way.

As I mentioned in my post on how to install WordPress if you think purchasing hosting plan from Hostgator is a bit costly then you can directly contact me as well and I will provide the same hosting at a very reasonable rate to you from my reseller account of Hostgator. So please don’t hesitate in asking me about your web hosting needs.

Installing WordPress

I guess installing wordpress.org blogging platform is self explanatory through this blog post of mine:

How to Install WordPress?

I need not to explain it over here, but if you have any doubts then you can anytime share a comment over my blogs or contact me through my mail id vatsalok@gmail.com

Importing Content

This is one of the most important steps and should be performed carefully. First, go to your old blog on wordpress.com and visit the Tools section from there select the Export option and download the XML file and preserve it on your PC.

Now you must need to login into the WordPress admin panel of your new site and visit the Tools section. Here, choose the option of Import and select WordPress and provide the same file which you downloaded only and it is done. All your WordPress.com content is now present at your new domain name.

Do remember some important stuff, by this process you won’t be able to transfer the videos which you uploaded on your wordpress.com blog but you can use them through the VideoPress plugin which will cost you somewhere around $60 per year.

Redirecting Site

The final step of the process of transferring your wordpress.com blog to self hosted blogs is the setting up of the redirection thing. Remember the fact that WordPress charges $13 per year for this.

For doing this you need to visit the store section of your old wordpress.com blog and purchase the site redirect option from there.

Once It’s done you can give the URL of your new blog over there and the redirection will be set properly.

So this is the all about how you can transfer from a free blog at wordpress.com to a premium self hosted WordPress blog. You all already know about my preferences about which blog is the better one and I always say the same about self hosted WordPress blog. The issues which restrict you on blogger or free WordPress platforms are not at all associated with self hosted blog.

Just to give you all an example, my blogger friend Shwetabh Mathur is really delighted to see the Mega Menu installed on my blog which I installed through Mega Menu plugin purchased from My Theme Shop. You can also see it if you take your mouse pointer to the top navigation menu. Now as Shwetabh loves this option, he wanted to implement the same on his own blog, which unfortunately works on Blogger platform and honestly I don’t know if they do allow such plugins.

As far as my limited knowledge about BlogSpot is concerned, I know that such use of any third party plugins is not allowed over there. So you can easily understand the situation and how my buddy Shwetabh is feeling. I would request you all if you do know about any solution of such situation, please do share the same over here so that I can help Shwetabh to configure the same on his blog.

You can also share your opinion about this blog post. Please do let me know your opinion about this blog post in the form of comments below.