Changing A record but keeping site access.

  • Unknown's avatar
    marjaeloheimo · Member ·

    If I change from a wordpress.com website that has a domain name hosted by another company such as mysite.com, to mysite.wordpress.com, will all the content and images still be there exactly as it was?
    Thanks!
    George

    I don’t have a site with WordPress.com yet

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Changing the domain does not change the actual content on the site. The site content will remain intact. It sounds like you no longer want to use a custom domain, but rather use the .wordpress.com subdomain moving forward?

  • Unknown's avatar
    marjaeloheimo · Member ·

    Hi Darnell,
    Thanks so much for your reply!
    We have rebuilt the site and will be hosting it at another hosting company. But we want to be able to access the older install for the info that wasn’t redone.
    Thanks again!
    George

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi George,

    It’s a bit tricky giving an accurate answer based on hypotheticals. Are you able to share the actual URL/domain of the site involved?

    You say you want to change from a WordPress.com website, but I don’t see any sites in the WordPress.com account you used to post here. And if you had a WordPress.com website, it would be hosted by us on WordPress.com, not by another company.

    This is important, because where your site is hosted completely changes the answer to your question:

    If the site is hosted on WordPress.com, i.e. an example.wordpress.com site that’s just appearing at an example.com custom domain, then cancelling the domain will just cause the site to go back to using the example.wordpress.com address.

    But if the site is hosted somewhere else, it was built using the open source version of WordPress, made by the community on WordPress.org. In that case your site doesn’t have a free example.wordpress.com address, as it’s not hosted on our servers.

    Cancelling your domain will take the site offline, and cancelling your hosting will cause the site’s files to be deleted from the hosting provider’s servers, and if you don’t have your own backups of the content, the content will be gone.

    To prevent that, you’ll need to create a new, empty WordPress.com site here with us, and use WordPress’s export/import function to migrate your content to this new site. Only once you’ve done that will it be safe to cancel your domain and hosting at the other provider. At that point your domain will no longer work, but you’ll still be able to access your content on the new site you created with us.

    Does that make sense? Please let me know if you have more questions about this :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    carlabrennan · Member ·

    Hi Kokkieh!
    Thanks so much for all your good advise. I completely understand all you say. I don’t have a wordpress.com site. I am doing the work for another wordpress.com member, but asked the question from my login just as a general question. Darnell confirmed my understanding of changing to the .wordpress.com subdomain.
    Thanks again, Kokkieh!
    George

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