Domain change issue

  • Unknown's avatar
    kellymk15 · Member ·

    I was planning on discontinuing my domain subscription with Blue Host (I have not yet) and changing my domain to the standard .wordpress.com format. I changed it to the .wordpress.com format in one of the settings pages and I believe I broke access to the site by doing so. The view/format of the site itself is messed up, my dashboard has changed and on the top left of the dash it says my site can no longer be accessed. I can’t find the setting page where I made the change to try to switch it back and I’m not sure where to go from here.

    Thank you!

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    This didn’t work for two reasons:

    1. Your site is not hosted on WordPress.com, so it doesn’t have a free WordPress.com address. We issue that address when a site is created on our servers. It’s not something you can just add to any WordPress site.

    2. There is a very specific process you need to follow to change the domain on a self-hosted WordPress site like yours, and your hosting provider might even have their own process on top of that. Just updating it in Settings will always break your site and lock you out of WP-Admin.

    You can see the process for doing this here:

    https://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL

    Though in this case you’ll likely need Bluehost support’s help to fix this.

    If you want to move that site to our free hosting here on WordPress.com, you’ll also need to follow a few steps.

    1. You’ll first need to create a new, free WordPress.com site at https://wordpress.com/start/site/

    2. Once that’s done you’ll need to export your content from the current site, and import it to us. You won’t be able to move any plugins or themes you’re using there to us, as those can only be used on our Business Plan.

    3. After you’ve migrated your content to us, we can also help you migrating any Jetpack subscribers to the WordPress.com site, as well as your Jetpack stats. Jetpack is the plugin that connects your Bluehost site to your WordPress.com account, and adds those two features, among others, to your site.

    4. Only once everything is transferred to us will it be safe to cancel your domain and hosting plan with Bluehost and take your site offline.

    We have a more detailed guide here:

    https://transferto.wordpress.com/self-hosted-wordpress-org/

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