GUIDED TRANSFER TO WORDPRESS.ORG – Part 1

Guided Transfer – Part 1

Preparation
(for a quick check list, see end of Part 2)

Moving your blog to WordPress.org isn’t straight forward. The easy way is to let someone do it for you. But even that is not all that simple. Without a Guided Transfer For Beginners manual, it’s tempting to give up. Don’t. If I can do it, so can you.

I’m an author, preparing for the moment when my first book will be released. More than that, I’m a blogger. It gives me joy if people comment on my posts, especially since I put a lot of effort into them. After having been with WordPress.com for a while, I became jealous of other websites that had fancy plugins. I didn’t really know what plugins could do and how they worked, but whenever I wanted my website to do something, I was told I needed a plugin. And WordPress.com don’t to plugins.

So I wanted what all the cool authors had. A WordPress.org site.

I already had my domain name, also hosted by WordPress.com. I had all the tools I needed, right? Before embarking on anything techie, I usually read up on the details. I studied several instruction manuals, checked out websites from people who had experience. Within a few hours I knew I wanted to use the Guided Transfer service offered by WordPress.com. Much less complicated.

Much less complicated doesn’t mean not complicated at all. At every turn, my lack of knowledge became ever more apparent.

During a Guided Transfer, a Happiness Engineer will be transferring your files, i.e. your blog posts, your scheduled posts, your pages, your stats, your blog followers etc., but he will NOT transfer the domain www.yourname.com. That’s an important difference.

Before I paid for the Guided Transfer, I needed to pick a new company to host my website in future. I chose Bluehost. WordPress recommended them and I heard good things about them.

So I paid my money, expecting everything else to take care of itself. It doesn’t. Bluehost offer all sorts of extra services, like security certificates to certify your website is free of malware, but it’ll take me months to find out what they all do. Anyway, so they had my money. Everything else was up to WordPress’s Happiness Engineer, right?

Wrong.

A couple of days later I got an email from Bluehost, reminding me the next payment for my domain name was due. It’s important you keep up payments, because once you let ownership of your domain lapse, you most likely won’t get it back. Or at least not for a price Joe Average can afford.

When I first joined WordPress.com, they had registered the domain name with a company called Wild West Domains. Bluehost gave me the choice of continuing to pay Wild West their yearly fees, or move my domain to Bluehost. There was no pressure.

I figured it made sense to have it all in one place, so I followed their link to the transfer site (there’s also a handy button on their website called “Transfer”). It informed me of two things. My domain, held by Wild West Domains, is locked, and I need an EPP Authorization Code.

At this point I wanted to cry. What’s an EPP Authorization Code? I found a contact address for Wild West Domains and asked them for information. Their response was they needed some information from the person who registered the domain before they could do anything. Yep, the tears started to trickle. I sent a support request to wordpress.com, since they originally registered my domain, hoping the Happiness Engineer would take care of everything.

Here their reply: ”We don’t transfer the domain to a different register during a Guided Transfer. We change the name servers to point to your host if the domain is purchased with us.”

I didn’t know who was pointing why and where. The tears were flowing now.

I’ve since found out that this means they will NOT deal with the domain at all during the Guided Transfer. What they will do is, once I have moved my domain to Bluehost, they will make sure that my website still links to my domain name, whoever is hosting it.

Ever resourceful, I rifled through my email account to find the original email sent to me when I signed up with wordpress.com. Bingo. That email contained a link. Guess where it took me? To my usual wordpress.com store on the dashboard. All the information was right there!!! I unticked the box labeled “locked” to change it to “unlocked,” then I clicked the button asking them to send me my authorization code.

A few minutes later, I received the code (in my spam filter) at the email address I registered with. Heartened, I copied the code they sent me into the Bluehost’s EPP Authorization Code field. To do that, I had to log in to Bluehost again. I simply clicked on the handy link at the bottom of the “Transfer” page. Bluehost then sent me another code (for verification purposes). I copied that code into the next field on the Bluehost site.

I think it worked. Well, something happened.

I was taken to another page which gave me the option of doing some “pointing” to something or other. I left the ticks at default, because I still had no idea what that meant. But I remembered the engineer saying that they will be pointing something at something, so I figured, if leaving it at default was wrong, they’ll probably sort it out for me. Anyway, Bluehost told me the transfer of my domain might take a few days.

This was all preparation for the big day. I hadn’t even paid for the Guided Transfer yet.

To find out how the actual transfer happened and what further surprises lay in store, click here to see end of Part 2.