Moving a Free Wordpress Hosted Blog to its Own Domain

I have a friend who has a highly trafficked blog hosted on Wordpress, kreahcraze.wordpress.com. Since my friend is getting quite a bit of traffic she would like to add ads to her site in order to make some money with her blog. However, wordpress doesn’t allow its users to have ads on their blogs. So, I have been helping her move her blog to her own domain and hosting, where she will have complete control of her blog. The tricky part about doing this is that she will likely lose a lot of traffic since many of her pages are listed in the search engines under her Wordpress.com domain and she likely also receives some traffic from Wordpresss.com itself. We have come up with a plan to minimize loss in traffic as much as possible while still giving her complete control of her blog on her own domain. I have not done this before so I have tried to do as much research on this subject as possible but haven’t found anyone explaining exactly what I think would be the best plan of action in her case, so I decided to share our plan in case someone else is considering doing the same. The plan is…

1. Buy a new domain (kreah-craze.com).

Cost: $8/yr.

Although Wordpress allows you to buy a domain through their site we decided to go with GoDaddy since we want to be eventually completely independent from wordpress.com.

2. Buy Domain Mapping from Within The Existing Wordpress Account

Cost: $10/yr.

This feature allows you to re-direct your existing traffic going to your wordpress.com blog to your own domain. So all traffic going to http://blog.wordpress.com/post/ will be redirected to http://newdomain.com/post/. At this point the blog is still technically hosted by Wordpress, but since the traffic is redirected using a 301 redirect to the new domain the search engines should recognize that the blog has moved permanently and will eventually update their index to list the new domain instead of the old one.

3. Build Links to and Promote the New Domain

Cost: It’s up to you. In our case very little.

By building links to the new domain we will help the search engines recognize and index the new domain and hopefully reclaim any loss in search engine ranking we may experience due to the switch. We will tell existing readers to update their bookmarks, and notify anyone linking to the old domain to update their links to point to the new domain. We want to get as much traffic as possible going directly to the new domain rather than being redirected through the old domain.

4. Move the Blog to its Own Hosting Independent of Wordpress.com, Run on an Independent Installation of Wordpress (downloadable at wordpress.org), and Add Ads

Cost: In our case $0 since we are just adding the domain to my existing hosting account, which allows unlimited domains. However, costs for those starting with nothing can range from a couple dollars per month up. I use HostMonster for hosting.

Once the search engines have indexed the new domain, and a significant amount of the blog’s traffic is going directly to the new domain rather than being redirected through the old domain we will cut all ties with the old domain and move the content of the blog to its own installation of wordpress on a separate hosting account. The reason this step is necessary is because up to this point the blog has still been hosted for free by wordpress.com, so the ban on ads still applied. To my knowledge you can only use the domain mapping feature as long as you are still hosting your blog on wordpress.com. When you move to your own hosting you are on your own and can no longer redirect the old domain to the new one. However, once we move to our own installation and hosting we can add ads and start monetizing the blog, which was the point to doing all this in the first place.

Additional Notes:

• When moving from an old domain to a new one using a 301 redirect you would usually keep the redirect in place permanently. However in this case that is not possible since we need to be independent of wordpress.com in order to add ads to the blog. If you were to do the switch also I would recommend waiting as long as possible before taking the last step and moving to your own wordpress installation so that more of your traffic is going directly to the new domain. Any traffic still going through the old domain when you make the switch to your own hosted installation will be lost.
• We will most likely lose some traffic no matter what when you finally do move to your own installation because there are existing links out there pointing to the old domain that will no longer be redirected, we will no longer receive traffic from wordpress.com, and we will likely experience a drop in search engine rankings. Hopefully we will build up enough traffic going directly to the new domain that this loss in traffic will be fairly insignificant.
• We are likely to lose some search engine rankings during this process because your old blog is hosted on wordpress.com which is already an established, trusted domain, and your new domain will initially be given less trust by the search engines. We can overcome this in time by promoting and building links to the new domain.
• If you were to do this switch and have an existing feedburner account it will be fairly easy to switch the feed to the new domain from within feedburner. However, if you are just using the default wordpress feed I would recommend start using a feedburner feed as soon as possible and encourage existing wordpress feed subscribers to switch to the new feedburner feed so you can take them with you to your new domain. Once you make the switch to your new domain all your previous wordpress subscribers will be lost.
• I have never actually done this before so I am not completely sure how it will all turn out. I will post an update when the entire process is complete and maybe a few updates in between. I hope for the best.

Update Aug. 27th, 2007: Kreah and I have written an update of this project at http://www.chrissandberg.com/an-update-on-switching-away-from-wordpresscoms-free-hosting/