Wordpress.com has a very easy import and export mechanism which means that moving your blog from one place to another is very quick and simple, giving you more time to concentrate on writing and all the other great things a self hosted blog has to offer. This post shows you how to do the actually migration once you have your self hosted blog installed.

How to guide to move your blog from Wordpress.com to a Self Hosted Wordpress Blog

Firstly you need to login to your Wordpress.com blog and go to you administration panel. Click on TOOLS – EXPORT. Here you are given the choice to confine the export to a particular author or select all authors (in most cases you’ll want to move your whole blog so click on all authors). Confirm everything and the export tool will gather together your posts, pages, comments, categories and tags together. This process creates a WXR file (Wordpress eXtended Rss). Once that process has finish click on the DOWNLOAD EXPORT FILE button and save it to somewhere safe on your desktop (this is a great way of doing quick local backups of your blog too). Congratulations you are halfway through the move!

The second part is importing your blog into your self hosted installation of Wordpress. This guide assumes you have already set up your self hosted wordpress blog on your own domain. To do do this you need to login to your self hosted blog and in the administration screen click on TOOLS – IMPORT. This gives you a choice of blogging platforms to import from but in this case you are importing from Wordpress so click on that. Next, click to browse and location the WXR file you downloaded (exported) on your computer. This will then upload this file in to your self hosted Wordpress site and unpack the contents of the files to your blog. All your posts, pages, categories, tags etc. will be there and will be in the template of your self hosted blog!

If you are moving to a self hosted blog to take advantage of the additional control and features of the Wordpress platform, you’ll probably be looking for a Premium Wordpress Theme to add that professional touch to your blog. To help with this please check out our Premium Wordpress Theme Reviews.