Migrating away from wordpress.com

Today I decided to migrate my blog from wordpress.com to my own domain.

I did it for many reasons:

• To be able to add plugins
• To be able to add javascript to individual pages
• To run a customized theme
• And all the other reasons listed here

I did not want to loose the popularity and the ranking of my original address, accumulated over the years.

Here are the steps I had to follow (if the following steps make no sense to you, this guide might help you):

• Setup a new empty Wordpress blog at lbolla.info/blog
• Exported the whole old blog as XML file (better called WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR): simply log into the admin interface of the old blog and click Tools > Export
• Imported the WXR file into the new empty blog by clicking Tools > Import in the admin interface
• Activate the Site Redirect upgrade in the old blog by clicking on Upgrades in the left-hand menu of the admin interface and paying a whopping 12$/year. Here is the description of this service:

Do you want to move away from WordPress.com to your own self-hosted WordPress installation without losing SEO ranking and breaking links? Have you recently changed your blog address and need to move traffic to the new address? This upgrade redirects your wordpress.com blog to your new blog by performing permanent (301) redirects for all of your content.

All the procedure took no more than 15 minutes. Brilliant.