SEO: Moving content from wordpress.com to your new website

Question

I have created a WordPress.com blog a few years ago. It is still live but I have not posted any new content in the last many years. However, things have changed now, I have time and I am ready to invest some money too.

I want to create a website on my own (not via Wordpress.com online CMS) with a new domain but with the same content that I have on my WordPress blog.

Question is: Will there be any SEO related issue in migrating content? Reference: https://help.one.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005585969-Move-your-WordPress-site-to-another-domain

E.g. if https://example.wordpress.com/how-to-print-hello-world-in-java becomes https://example.com/how-to-print-hello-world-in-java

Once this is done successfully I want to close the blog permanently and continue on a new website only.

Answer 1

WordPress.com doesn't offer full WordPress functionality. Much of the article you linked to doesn't apply. On Wordpress.com you can't:

• get database access
• install plugins

To get your data out of WordPress.com, you will either need to:

• export XML
• copy and paste each page manually

To preserve your SEO, you would ideally redirect redirect each page from your old blog to the corresponding page on the new blog. Unfortunately, wordpress.com charges $13 per year to redirect for you!

As an alternative you can implement a poor man's redirect where you edit each page on the old blog, remove all the content, and replace it with nothing other than a link to the correct page on the new blog. That won't be quite as good for SEO as a 301 permanent redirect, but it should be almost as good.

You don't want to close your old blog entirely. That would throw away any rankings you had in Google and you would have to start over from scratch.