Migrating your WordPress.com site to Bluehost – What’s missing?
I am be moving my blog from the current wordpress hosted site to a self hosted domain. Simply crondev.blog instead of crondev.wordpress.com
I have tried to ensure there is no change for any of my readers: all posts and comments are migrated, subscribers are moved from the old site, all links are redirected from old site to new site.
I wouldn’t just leave this post here, so here’s my journey in this migration.
Why move out?
First of all, I would like to acknowledge WordPress.com for doing an excellent job at providing a high quality free publishing service which has allowed me to share my content over the years. It was a stepping stone for me and helped me get up and running in no time. Now, it is time for graduation 🙂
- Better named domain added to the blog
- Complete control over the website SEO / Google Analytics
- Added WordPress plugins which make life a lot easier
- Complete control over CSS of the site
- No ads for my viewers
Reasons of using Bluehost vs using WordPress premium
Bluehost turns out to be much cheaper than a hosted WordPress plan and is as easy to set up. $25/month for the same functionality except offered by Business plan at WordPress to meet the above shortcomings, against total hosting cost on Bluehost is $120 for 3 years.
Apart from that, Bluehost gives WordPress as a one click install application, but at the same time, gives me complete control of the server allowing me to run multiple sites if I want to.
Things I missed from WordPress (and how I fixed them)
- Native inline code support (added by SyntaxHighlighter plugin).
- Automatic backups (Plugins like Updraft allow scheduled backing up on Google Drive)
- Premium wordpress themes (come on, developers need no themes!)
- Missing AMP support (added AMP Plugin)
Migration to new site
An excellent guide is here, but I will quickly list the steps needed.
- Moving content was the easiest. Simply do a WP XML export and Import.
- Keeping old links working Set up a redirect at WordPress.com, costs 13$ a year. I plan to do it only for the first year
- Moving Stats Although it is a manual process from Jetpack team, they were extremely responsive and did the required within a couple of hours.
- Moving Subscribers Simply connected my site to Jetpack and it helped me do the needful.
In all, my entire experience was very smooth and great! I hope that all of you continue enjoying reading my blog.
As a tech/dev related blogger, down the road you’ll realize that it would have been far more prudent for you to have moved to a VPS than anything offered by BlueHost or any shared webhost.
For $25/month you could have gotten a VPS package that provides 25 times more performance than what you have now.
Possibly yes. In what terms do you think a shared server is inferior as compared to a VPS? Functionality wise, I already have everything that I need to manage and run the blog for now. Additionally, there is nothing which locks me down to Bluehost, I can simply migrate my site to my own server if needed.
The costs are as low as 3$ monthly including the domain, and I don’t see how the VPS is ever going to match that.
When you say performance, do you mean load performance? Honestly, I am not there yet, my subscribers are few, and the maximum views I get are in hundreds a day. Hopefully will grow bigger 🙂