Migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org the time has come!
Why I am migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org?
I’ve had this blog since 2013 and blogged on and off very sporadically over that time. I’ve had months where I blogged a lot only to burn out and months and months when I haven’t blogged at all. November last year I set myself the small goal of blogging once per week and to publish the post every Saturday.
I started on WordPress.com it was fine all I wanted to do was write posts and had little desire to do much else. As I started to get more readers I needed more, I started to notice shortcomings on the wordpress.com platform, for example, I had an idea where I would like to create a monthly newsletter for email subscribers but to hook my blog into my CRM service of choice would mean I needed to upgrade to a business plan, there is no chance I was paying $300 per year for a personal blog site that is a hobby more than anything. So I embarked on the task of migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org.
Don’t get me wrong wordpress.com is good. If you want to write posts go buy a domain, pick a theme and away you go but as soon as you desire more control or analytics than Automatic’s Jetpack tool can offer then wordpress.com is not the place you want to be unless you have deep pockets.
On the flip side, wordpress.org offers the WordPress software with the caveat that you must self-host, there are tons of self-hosting providers out there, research some, pick what fits your needs and in an hour or two you will have a WordPress site, this is where the similarities with wordpress.com end, while yes the interface looks the same now being self-hosted you are on the hook for every aspect of your site, things you may not have considered are site security, site performance, backups and maintenance of these areas are covered for you with wordpress.com but on utilising wordpress.org the responsibility lies with you with little hand-holding along the way.
I actually enjoy this extra control I work in technology so I am not particularly phased by the more technical side involved of being self-hosted requires but I can see how it would put others off. It gives me the feeling that my blog is now mine and I am no longer utilizing someone else’s platform, it’s only been one week but already I have seen extra growth and viewership from moving to a self-hosted blog. The extra granularity, SEO capabilities and analytics available can only help me grow further.
I actually enjoy this extra control I work in technology so I am not particularly phased by the more technical side involved of being self-hosted requires but I can see how it would put others off. It gives me the feeling that my blog is now mine and I am no longer utilizing someone else’s platform, it’s only been one week but already I have seen extra growth and viewership from moving to a self-hosted blog. The extra granularity, SEO capabilities and analytics available can only help me grow further.
I have some ideas on what I would like to add to my blog primarily a newsletter albeit I haven’t really decided on the frequency that I want to send it (once per year?).
Addons used after Migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org
If you are reading this post and thinking of moving to a self-hosted plan here’s a no-nonsense list of the addons I am using, none of these are affiliate links its a list of the addons I am using at the time of writing.
Akismet Anti-Spam | Anti Spam addon by Automatic |
|---|---|
| Antispam Bee | Another Anti Spam, I’ll drop one soon |
| iThemes Security | Take the guess-work out of securing your site |
| Jetpack | Created by Automatic, might drop it once I get used to SiteKit |
| Site Kit | One stop shop for everything Google |
| WP Fastest Cache | Site cache, I also use Cloudflare for CDN |
| UpdraftPlus | Site backups |
| Rank Math SEO | Offers more features for free than Yeoast SEO |
When planning to for the task of migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org I opted to use OVH as my self-hosting provider, I’ve used them for a number for years for a small VPS and never had any issue so I figured why not stick with a provider that I know provide a reliable service.
If you have got this far through this post on migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org you might be wondering why there are so many links, table of contents, tables, images etc.
This post is an SEO learning experience to get the highest SEO score I can with Rank Math SEO and all these additions are gold for SEO and ranking on search engines. Thanks for reading my post on migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. If you decider to migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org yourself give me a shout and let me know how it goes.
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