Dear Christina

Dear Christina,

I have a blog on wordpress.com and am tired of the limited functionality of it. Can I move all my blog posts over to a self-hosted, wordpress.org site easily?

NoName

Dear NoName,

Moving your posts from .com to .org is quite easy actually.

First, you need to purchase hosting and a domain name for your new blog. I recommend either Startlogic or JustHost as I have used both and know they are easy to work with.

Next you need to install Wordpress and then choose a theme and get it installed, as well as any plugins you’d like to have.

The final step is to use the “export” function on your .com blog. The resulting file will contain your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags – not your text widget contents.

Now just use the “import” function on your new .org blog and you should see all of your content where it belongs.

In rare instances, when trying to “import” you may get an error message. At this point, make sure you exported correctly and that your .org site is completely updated. If this does not fix the problem you’ll need to check with Wordpress support to try and figure it out.

I don’t use .com at all (never have) but I know people who have been wondering how to do this so figured I could give some basic instructions. If you require further help working with .com, you’ll have to check in at their forum.

~Christina