Migrate Blog: WordPress.com to WordPress.org (1 of 3)

Over the past year, I have noticed more and more companies starting to blog.  Creating a blog for your company is crucial in this day in age.  It not only helps let your customers know what is currently going on with your business, but it also gives them the feeling that they are connected and invested in your company.  Although those are good reasons why a company should blog,  I think the main reason a company should blog is for search engine optimization (SEO).  SEO not only helps search engines find your site, but it also tells the search engines what your web site is about.  Letting search engines know what your site is about is key to getting found on the internet today.  Although blogging on a blogging platform helps get traffic back to your site, the best way to generate SEO is creating a blog on your own site.  This way the search engines will bring traffic directly to your site, rather than a blogging platform and from there you can hope customers go to your site.  If you currently have a blog on wordpress.com, blogger (blogspot), or tumblr and your site or part of your site was created on wordpress.org, then I will show you how to easily move that blog over to your wordpress.org site.  Due to the amount of content on this article, I am going to break it up into three different articles, one for each platform.  The following is about how to move your wordpress.com blog to your wordpress.org site.
Tumblr.com to WordPress.org
Blogger.com / Blogspot.com to WordPress.org

Exporting

Left Sidebar

Before I begin, wordpress.com is a blogging platform in which wordpress hosts your content and you have a domain like www.yourname.wordpress.com.  Wordpress.org is that same content managment system that you install on your server.  With wordpress.org, you pay for the hosting and you have a domain name like www.yourname.com.  To start off, you will want to login to your wordpress.com account and go to your administration panel.  On the left sidebar, click on Tools >> Export.  When the page loads, you will have the option to choose what to export.  If you just want your posts, pages, feedback or all content.  It goes on to explain that is you export all content, it includes all of your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, terms, navigation menus and custom posts.  If there are more than one users on this blog, you will also have the choice to export a single authors content or all authors.  When you use the wordpress.com export tool, your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, terms, navigation menus and custom posts are all placed in a wordpress extended rss file (WXR). WordPress basically takes an XML RSS file and adds a couple extra fields to make is specific for their platform.  Once you are finished making your choices, click on the “Download Export File” and the file will start to download to your computer.  You’ve now done half to work!

Importing

Plugin needed to Import

I am currently running WordPress version 3.3, so this guide will mirror that platform.  WordPress usually does a pretty good job of not changing anything huge, so if you have an earlier version (or later) it should be pretty close to the following instructions.  You will now want to login to your self hosted (wordpress.org) account.  Once your on the dashboard, go to the left sidebar and click on Tools >> Import.  You will then see a list of  other blogging platforms (or systems).  You will want to choose WordPress.  As soon as you choose WordPress, a window will open that prompts you to install a plugin.  Go ahead and click  the “Install Now” button in the upper right hand corner.  Your system will then go through the normal plugin installation and will stop at the activate prompt (if everything was install correctly).  You want to go ahead and activate the plugin.  This will activate the plugin and also start the importer.  You will then want to click “Choose File” and select your wordpress.com file you just recently exported. Once you have selected the file, click “Upload file and import.”  WordPress will then upload your file and unpack all the data the file contains.  Once the WXR file is uploaded and unpacked, your wordpress.org site should now contain all the posts, pages, comments, custom fields, terms, navigation menus and custom posts.

Possible Error:

Some webhosts limit the maximum file size of an upload in their PHP.int file to 2MB and sometimes smaller.  I have no idea why they do this, but it can sometimes be a problem when trying to upload your blog.  It does take a pretty sizable blog to hit the 2MB size, but it does happen.  If you happen to have a WXR file that is larger than 2MB, this first thing I would recommend is contact your webhost and asking them to increase the size.  If they refuse, you can always ask them to upload the file for you.  If they still refuse, you can upload your own custom PHP.int file and/or .htaccess file that will [sometimes] overwrite the existing.  For some servers, this is a system-wide setting and therefor can’t be changed.  If you are a novice, I would recommend you not doing this, because you can mess some things up.  If that’s the case, I would just continue to plead to your webhost.  There may alway be the possibility of stepping up your hosting one level.  You may have to pay more per month, but you can then upload your file and then later downgrade. If you feel comfortable enough to try to edit your PHP.int and/or .htaccess file, you will want to add the following lines to your PHP.int file:

upload_max_filesize = 10M;
post_max_size = 20M;

And the following lines to your .htaccess file:

php_value upload_max_filesize 10M
php_value post_max_size 20M

If this works, then you know your webhost doesn’t have the limit of 2MB as a system-wide setting.  If it doesn’t work, then sadly, it means you need to continue pleading with your webhost.

Tumblr.com to WordPress.org
Blogger.com / Blogspot.com to WordPress.org