How to move an active blog from WP-hosted to self-hosted and preserve traffic
-
Hi all – apologies if this has been addressed before. I ran some FAQ and forum searches and didn’t come up with anything.
I currently have a blog that is getting around 1200 daily page views. Due to some content heavy posts, I have several incoming links to these posts. For a variety of reasons I would like to move to self-hosting.
My concern is how to do this and preserve the incoming traffic. It seems like I will be starting from scratch since all the URLs of my blog and posts will be different. I’ve read about domain mapping and it doesn’t seem to be the solution for this.
I’d be very interested in the community’s response to this. Thanks in advance.
-
If you buy the domain upgrade through wordpress.com, then you will have your own domain name, but your blog will still reside here on wordpress.com and you will still have all the same restrictions and such.
If you get your own domain name and a web host, and then use the software from wordpress.org, you will have virtually no restrictions. The downside is that you will be responsible for all upgrades, troubleshooting and maintenance. Here at wordpress.com all of that is taken care of for you.
The other thing is that you will lose google and technorati juice and page rank when you make the move, and it will take about six months to get it back. You can keep your blog here with a “final post” to redirect your visitors to your new blog, which will help.
Experience demonstrates that it will take about 6 months for your traffic to recover.
-
You will take a serious hit on traffic, and there is no way to have those links to your WP.com blog lead automatically to your new blog. TT is right that it will take you about six months to recover to the hits you enjoy now, provided that you do basic blog promotion at the new web address, including re-registering in the blog directories you were at before, pinging, and encouraging social bookmarking.
What are your reasons for moving? Perhaps there are workarounds here.
-
Thanks for the feedback – that’s pretty much what I was assuming, except for the 6 months. I was guessing something more like 2-3 months, so I really need to think this through now.
My main drivers for moving was greater access to my style-sheet, in particular javascript. There are a couple third party apps I’d like to integrate that require javascript code.
Also, I have been considering some small amount of advertising, maybe something like Adsense, and I know this isn’t allowed on WP-hosted sites.
Thirdly, I find the basic WP stats inadequate as my blog has grown and I saw some more functional plug-ins for self-hosted sites.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
-
FYI – I have never gotten back my Google page rank since I went to domain-mapping. It’s been nearly 11 months since I did that.
-
Just remembered the other thing I want to do. Would like to potentially use google docs to embed tabular info in the blog. Their embed code used iframes which aren’t supported by WP-hosted blogs.
-
Direct traffic from followers will still follow you on a move, but Google is slower I guess ;) If there are things that you need that can’t be done here, then a move is really the way to go. It takes time to get the traffic back, but everyday you don’t move is also one day further than getting the traffic back when you move!
Trent
-
Thanks for all the comments. I believe I will probably still move the site, but leave my old one up for a while with a prominent front page giving the new address.
Trent – Your comment about “direct traffic from followers will still follow you on a move”. Could you explain? If you mean once Google re-finds my content the links in the search results will be updated, then I get what you’re saying. If you’re saying that existing bookmarks or links will somehow still work, then I’d be interested in more details.
Thanks in advance.
- The topic ‘How to move an active blog from WP-hosted to self-hosted and preserve traffic’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 