GUIDED TRANSFER TO WORDPRESS.ORG – Part 2

Guided Transfer – Part 2

(for a quick check list, see below; for part 1, click here)

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.

Enough chitchat. So how do I move my blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org?

I officially paid for the Guided Transfer on a Friday. They scheduled it for the next Tuesday, warning it would take 24 hours. In the meantime, there should be no downtime on my website, but they asked me to not make any changes during that time.

The Happiness Engineer got to it in the evening.

Indeed, he was quickly done, of which I was informed by email. The email also gives you a link which you should bookmark, together with a new password for your account. BUT I had to wait 40 hours (up to 72 hours in some cases) for the changes to “spread” across the Internet.

This is important. It means that while the transfer only took 24 hours, you can’t do anything with your website until the changes have spread. Apparently, this means it will take that long for the Internet to understand that, next time you type “www.yourdomain.com,” you want to go to the new website and not the old wordpress.com site.

[It’s worth noting that so far, I have not come across anything a specific website called WordPress.org. I think the whole WordPress.org stuff is a myth. 🙂 Not that it matters.]

I noticed the transfer was complete when the number of followers on my website had changed. That’s because it no longer counted facebook and twitter followers – only my blog followers. The link the engineer gave me connected me to a wordpress login site, looking just like the one I had used before. I tried logging in, but it seemed I had the wrong details. Before writing to the engineer in a panic, I deleted my chache (=my Internet history and my cookies), and finally it worked. Upon logging in, a dashboard appeared, which looked very much like the old dashboard, just snazzier with a few extras.

By the way, the website itself looked exactly like my old one, too. That is one of the things the engineer tries to do for you, so your followers and visitors never experience any “downtime.” To help with that, the engineer installed my first pluging called Jetpack Plugin for me. It provides many features, most notably the same “stats” feature, “follow” feature and “follow by email” feature I had on my .com site.

I could even use publicize again, the feature that lets you automatically announce your new posts on facebook, twitter etc. Trouble was, by connecting to it, I had to connect to my old wordpress.com site. So I logged into facebook and twitter and google, but my dashboard was no longer the snazzy new one. Where had it gone? (Whatever you do, don’t post anything until you have your new dashboard back!)

I logged out and tried logging in again, but the “wrong password” message came up once more. I deleted the cache TWICE, and finally, my new password was accepted. Phew.

Guided Transfer comes with a two-week service period, during which time the Happiness Engineer will be at your beck and call with questions and advice. Still, the engineer’s email recommended to take advantage of Vaultpress, at least for the first month after initial installation. Vaultpress keeps backups of your website, so if in your exuberance to tinker with your website you mess something up which you cannot fix, you can simply restore an earlier version (and try again). They even offer the first month for free. To me, this made sense.

That’s when I ran into more techie trouble. I paid for Vaultpress lite. To set up, they asked for something called SSH and FTP. I’d heard of FTP before (whenever you upload something), but that was the extent of my knowledge. You can find both on your host’s website (in my case the Bluehost website). But honestly, this was far outside my comfort zone. I sent another request to my lovely Happiness Engineer, asking if the whole techie stuff ever got easier. He replied, “No, it doesn’t get easier. What does get easier is knowing where to turn to for answers.”

With that comforting bedside manner, it’s a wonder he didn’t choose to be a doctor. 🙂

He got in touch with his Vaultpress.com colleague, who set Vaultpress up for me. I didn’t have to do a thing.

Finally, the email included a link to Akismet. That’s the same feature that stops spam messages as I had on my WordPress.com site. I didn’t need the link, because it was right there on my dashboard now, and I merely had to click to activate it (if it isn’t there, ask your Happiness Engineer about it).

Since then, I’ve been learning new things non-stop. I’ve played around with the layout, even picked a new theme. I’ve found a few plugins that might be useful, among them Google Analytics, Yoast, and Mailchimp.

As complicated and frustrating as all this has been, don’t give up. The engineer really tries to help you. Thanks to him and his advice, I know that, even if I mess up my lovely website, everything should be recoverable.

Guided Transfer tl;dr

ADVANTAGES OF MOVING FROM HOSTED (WordPress.com) TO SELF-HOSTED (WordPress.org)

• Plugins
• More control
• Option of selling your books/services from your website

SIGNING UP WITH NEW HOST

• Sign up
• Check on the store section on your wordpress dashboard to unlock your domain and receive Authorization code
• Enter code on new host’s website and follow instructions

GUIDED TRANSFER

• Pay
• Wait for your email informing you of schedule
• Remember not to plan any updates for up to 96 hours (24 h for transfer, plus 72 hours for change to take effect)
• Once transfer is complete and the changes have “spread,” clear your cache and log in
• If needed, re-connect to social media

VAULTPRESS AND ASKISMET

• In case of trouble installing Vaultpress, pay, and then ask the Happiness Engineer if he can help you out
• Click on Akismet link to activate

For everything else, ask your Happiness Engineer. Many times, if necessary.
Good luck!