Upgrading to Paid Plan and Potential Impact on SEO

  • Unknown's avatar
    aieces · Member ·

    Dear WordPress.com Support,

    I have been using WordPress.com for my blog, chiemtinhthuat.wordpress.com, since 2013. I’m pleased to say that it has grown steadily and now receives an average of 600 visitors per day.

    I am now looking to upgrade to a paid plan so I can monetize this traffic. However, I am very concerned that upgrading and moving to a custom domain will negatively impact the SEO I have built up over the years.

    I am very eager to upgrade to a paid plan with a more professional domain name, but the fear of losing all my existing traffic is holding me back. Is there a way to mitigate this risk or a recommended approach for transitioning to a paid plan without losing my current SEO rankings?

    Any advice or guidance you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

    Thank you for your time and support.

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

  • Unknown's avatar
    2020testjj · Member ·

    Is there a way to mitigate this risk or a recommended approach for transitioning to a paid plan without losing my current SEO rankings?

    When your site changes address, regardless of it being from a free WordPress.com site address to a custom domain, that will negatively impact your SEO for a while.

    You asked this same question last year in August and received answers at https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/will-upgrading-to-premium-lose-my-websites-seo/

    If you have more questions after reviewing that other forum thread and its links, you can post them here.

  • Unknown's avatar
    dmitrimartin817 · Member ·

    Upgrading to a paid plan and moving to a custom domain is a great step, and if done correctly, your SEO rankings should remain intact. The key is ensuring proper 301 redirects from your old WordPress.com URLs to your new domain. WordPress.com typically handles this well when you upgrade, but you’ll want to double-check that all your pages redirect correctly.

    A potential issue during the transition is that search engines may temporarily reprocess your site, causing fluctuations in rankings. To monitor how search engines interact with your new domain, you can use a plugin like Traffic Monitor (https://wordpress.org/plugins/traffic-monitor/) to log bot visits and ensure Google is crawling and indexing your new URLs correctly. Additionally, updating your sitemap in Google Search Console and keeping internal links consistent will help speed up reindexing.

    If you follow these steps, your traffic should stabilize quickly, and over time, a custom domain can improve your SEO rather than hurt it.

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