If I delete my old blog, will I still keep my followers?

  • Unknown's avatar
    reneesaraleary · Member ·

    If I delete an old blog, will I still keep my followers? I recently moved my blog over to a web server and use wordpress.org. WordPress.com Support helped me move all of my followers over to my new site at http://www.fearlessfoodandfitness.com, but the old blog is still functioning at http://www.fearlessfoodandfitness.wordpress.com. If I delete this old blog, will that affect my followers and/or other functions on my self-hosted wordpress blog (such as Jetpack?). I’m still having views on my old site and am not getting the traffic that I want on my new site, so I am trying to figure out if deleting the old blog is the best way to approach that.

    Please lend me your advice at your earliest convenience. Thank you!

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

  • kraftbj · Staff ·

    Hi,

    Deleting your old site doesn’t have an impact on the followers on your current site. If you delete the site, the folks reading your content will simply see a deadend, which may not help them find your new site.

    There are a couple of options:

    • Changing your settings on your old site to disallow search engines. Right now, search engines can still index your site, so folks may be finding your site through those results. Changing the setting at https://fearlessfoodandfitness.wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-reading.php to discourage search engines from indexing your site will eventually remove the old site from Google, reducing the folks finding your site that way.
    • You can purchase our Site Redirect upgrade, which will direct all traffic from your old site to your new site.

      The only hiccup with that is if folks visit an individual post on your old site, they will get a Not Found page on your new site (since your WordPress.com site has URLs including the date, like /2013/11/27/title-of-post while your new site doesn’t, like /2013/11/title-of-post). This may still be better since you can have your “not found” page welcome people to your new site, etc.

    A few ideas :-) Please let me know what questions you have. Cheers!

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