Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Moving a website from a free platform such as WordPress.com to one that is self-hosted can be a nightmare. (Just ask me. I know. I did this recently!) Problems will arise, but solutions can be found, if you know what to do and who to ask for help.

I was faced with several problems when moving from my old site to my new one. Some solutions were found simply by asking for help but others were found through trial and error. In this article, I will reveal two major problems I faced and the solutions I found. It is my hope that you can learn what to do and what to expect when moving your website by using my personal experience as a model.

Moving Posts – the easy part

I’m pleased to announce that I was able to move all of posts from my old site to the new one in about two minutes. It was actually easy.

All I had to do was:

• go to my dashboard, and choose Tools then Export,
• select what I wanted to move (Posts, Pages, or both),
• download the file to my computer,
• go to the dashboard of my new site, choose Tools then Import,
• and upload the file from my computer to my new site.

I opted to move only my posts and not my pages, as part of the reason for having a new site was to design things a bit differently!

Redirecting – the hard part

My  blog was formerly called “Lorraine Reguly’s Life” but it is no longer accessible. If you try to visit it, you will be brought to “Wording Well” instead. Why? Because there is a redirect in place, which I purchased through the Store on WordPress.com for a cost of $13 per year. Read More