Last night, with a couple of hours to spare, I decided to get on and move my blog away from WordPress.com to my own hosting. Why do this?
- Access to my own Google Analytics data
- Use of any plugin I like
- Association my content with my domain name
- Greater control over the site, to, for example, add Google Authorship links
I’ve been running the blog on WordPress.com since 6th December 2007, but time has come to move to new pastures. The move process was very simple:
- Set up WordPress on my Linux server (5 minutes)
- Export existing blog content using WordPress XML export
- Import XML into new blog
- Pay $12 / year to 301 all pages / posts from the old blog to the new domain
This was I won’t lose any of my Google ranking weight, and users won’t get the dreaded 404 on that key post they were looking for.
To get my new blog up to scratch I did some research and loaded up the following 10 awesome WordPress plugins:
- Akismet – the de facto comment and trackback spam protection
- Digg Digg – add as many social media buttons as you can shake a stick at
- Google Analytics for WordPress – all in the name
- Head Space2 – manage SEO meta-data to a fine grained level
- Multi Social Favicon – auto-generate the blog favicon using a social media account
- Smart Video – simple YouTube, Vimeo video embeds
- SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – awesome syntax highlighting for code in posts
- Tweet old post – keep old posts alive by tweeting them every now and then
- W3 Total Cache – speed up your blog with caching
- WP-DBManager – database management, backups – essential
WordPress is an awesome blogging platform; it moves out of the way so you can focus on writing content. And with the large plugin and theme offerings out there, there’s no excuse to share your knowledge with the wider community.
Get on and write something!
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