OMSH

Once you have purchased your new domain name, purchased web hosting and set up WordPress as the publishing platform for your new blog, you’ll likely want to tell your readers at your old blog where to find you now. You have a few options here:

1. You can leave your old blog up with an explanation and a new link.

Simple enough, just leave your old blog as is, type in a new entry with a link to your new site and tell everyone to meet you there. Your old blog will no longer be updated, but will stand as an archive/history/record of your old entries. You may like this idea if your new blog is starting over fresh – in other words, you aren’t importing your old entries.

2. You may want to delete your old blog entries and insert a bit of code into your template to automatically re-direct your readers to the new blog.

To use code to automatically re-direct visitors to the new blog, you’ll need to have access to your weblog’s template files. Some free, hosted weblog solutions do not allow this. Here are some tutorial links for code insertion of re-directs:

• Javascript Re-Direct
• HTML Re-Direct
• Another HTML Re-Direct

3. If your current hosted blog situation allows it, you may be able to upload an .htaccess file to automatically re-direct readers to your new site. I am not familiar with ANY free, web-hosted blogging platforms that allow for this type of re-direct. Feel free to correct me if yours does.

Creating an .htaccess file is somewhat advanced, but is a clean way to do the job of re-directing. Here is a comprehensive tutorial on .htaccess re-directs.

4. Finally, don’t forget to ask your old blog solution if they have a re-direct option or solution built right into the blogging software. Most webtools aren’t going to help you leave them, but you never know unless you ask.

Other helpful tips

Changing domains is always a bit nerve wracking. Will all your readers move with you? Will you lose traffic? Here are some tips to ensure your audience doesn’t lose you in the move.

• Even if you’re going to delete all of your old entries after importing them into your new blog, it’s a good idea to make a final entry detailing the move with a link to your new url. Give it a day or so to ensure that all the feed readers pick up the entry before you delete your posts.
• You might want to leave something up at the old blog for late comers or readers clicking through on old links on the internet.
• Update your profile on Technorati and other similar listing sites. When I moved from www.verymom.com I updated my Very Mom Technorati profile to say, “This blog has moved to www.kerflop.com” and on my Kerflop Technorati listing, made sure it said, “Formerly blogging at www.verymom.com”. Even a year later, I still had people stumbling across my site not realizing I was blogging somewhere else.
• Don’t panic if your stats are lower after your move, just keep doing what you’ve been doing and your numbers will climb again.

Originally written by Jessica as part of the Ditch Your Blogging Training Wheels lab segment from the Blogher ‘07 Transitioning to a self-hosted blog.