Moving WordPress.com site to personal domain intact

Question

The question is asked many times in different forms, but can't find my answer from any of 'em.

Question is self explanatory, but need to mention some scenario:

• I'm not moving to .org, it's a personal domain, I've bought from somewhere else.
• I know how to export and import content from WP site.
  • But if I do that, the images are not copied, they are sharing their path from the previous .com site. (To let it not happen, I'll need to manually download all the images and then to upload 'em to new site: That's not a solution.)
• How to export and import data from .com to personal website where all the attachment paths are also transferred. So that, they doesn't require to go to the old site.

I hope I'm clear with my demand.

I'm really struggling with this.

Answer 1

"Moving to .org" means "moving from WordPress.com blog provider to your own installation of WordPress which you can download from wordpress.org" - just to clear out your first point.

And than, after you export all data from your wordpress.com account, while importing them to your local install, you're asked to automaticly download all images. Answer yes and your images get donwloaded from your previous account and uploaded to your new install.

About the thing with your hardcoded urls. I'm using this SQL script to programatically rewrite old URLs after moving to new domain:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://wordpress.com', 'http://wordpress.org') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://wordpress.com', 'http://wordpress.org');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://wordpress.com', 'http://wordpress.org');
UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value, 'http://wordpress.com', 'http://wordpress.org');

Replace all http://wordpress.com by your formal URL and http://wordpress.org by your new domain (either example.com, example.org, example.cz - whatever) and run this SQL from phpmyadmin/adminer (or similar piece of software) of your new DB

Answer 2

When exporting content from WordPress.com, you should be given the option to:

Download & import file attachments

This should be enough to help if you're blog is straight forward, which I assume it is if you're coming from WordPress.com. http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/

Important note - the references to Moving to WordPress.org basically means moving to a self-hosted WordPress site using the software from WordPress.org. This appears to be exactly the scenario you outlined. This is the key difference between .com and .org.

IF using the traditional import/export method (with the Download attachment option) doesn't work for you...

You can try importing posts via an RSS Feed and/or using a WordPress.com Importer Plugin.

You would set up your new WordPress site on the newly acquired domain/host and then install these plugins.

WP RSS Multi Importer - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-rss-multi-importer/ WordPress.com Importer - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpresscom-importer/

Hope this helps