How To Switch From WordPress.com To A Self Hosted WordPress Blog
While there is nothing wrong with using WordPress.com considering it is free, if you are really serious about blogging then you need to be running a self hosted version of WordPress. Fortunately, this is rather easy to do since the same company makes both versions instead of us trying to mesh together 2 different companies software.
This post assumes that you already have a WordPress.com blog as well as a self hosted version of WordPress which can be downloaded from WordPress.org.
Exporting the WordPress.com blog
Log into your WordPress.com account and navigate to the Admin Dashboard of the blog that you are going to be transferring. Once you are on the Dashboard, click the Tools menu and then select the Export option from the list.
You will be taken to the Export page where we create the file that we need. Essentially, a .XML file is created which contains data for posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories and tags.
If you have multiple authors on your blog you can select which author’s data you would like to export or leave it at the default and just export all data. Click Download Export File and save the .XML file in a place that you can easily remember and find.
That is all that we are concerned with for the WordPress.com version. Easy, right? Next we move into our self hosted blog and upload the data.
Uploading the data to the self hosted version
Once again, navigate to the Admin Dashboard of the self hosted version of your WordPress blog. Click on the Tools section and select the Import option from the list. Since we are importing from a WordPress.com blog, make sure to select WordPress from the list of software.
Then, browse your computer and find the file that you just downloaded. After that, click the Upload file and import button to move onto the next page. The next page will allow you to either import the new posts into a custom author on the blog or to mesh them together with an author that already exists. You can go either way, whatever makes things easier for you in the long run.
Also, if you have any files attached to posts/pages, make sure to click the Download and import file attachments check box. Once your options are set, all that is left to do is click the Submit button and let WordPress handle the rest. You will then be taken to a progress page which lets you see what is going on such as which posts are being imported as well as any possible errors or conflicts during the import.
If everything went off without a hitch, you should see a message telling you All done with a link leading back to the main Admin Dashboard page. Congratulations! You just successfully imported a WordPress.com blog to a self hosted version of WordPress.
As a precautionary note, WordPress only allows files to be imported that are less then 2MB in size. If you have a lot of posts on your WordPress.com blog you may find that it is too large to import into WordPress. If this issue does occur, don’t worry. There will be upcoming posts shortly on this blog for such instances and this post will be updated as soon as they go live.
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