To Move or Not to Move?

… that is the question.

Have been getting questions from people who wanted to move from their free hosted sites (BlogSpot, WordPress.com) to their own hosted blog.

Here are my usual qualifying metrics:

Age of the Blog. The older the blog, the harder it becomes for the blogger to let go of the site. Usually, other sites and blogs have already linked to it and transferring the blog to a new hosted domain will mean loosing all those link love. Unless you can contact most of them and tell them to edit your link, then there’s no other easy way.

Total Amount of Posts Made. Even if you have a 3 year old blog but only have less than 10 posts during that entire time, you can take the risk and move all the posts. What you just need to do is edit each of the posts and add a notice for new visitors to view the post on the new domain instead.

PageRank of the Site. Age of the site, inbound links and volume of content affects your PR and it’s painfull to leave a PR5 or higher and start all over again. Unless you can do a permanent redirect, there’s no way but charge this to experience and hope that in the next update, your new domain gets the same PR as the old one.

Traffic. The main reason why we worry about moving blogs — that we might loose all the traffic we get. Check how much the search engines bring in as well as from your feeds and from link referrals. This should give you an overview how much you’d expect to loose once you move.

Revenue. Along with traffic, revenue is another concern when abandoning a blog. A good way to offset this is not to close the blog but leave it the way it is (you can stop posting and disable commenting pointing them to the new URL for the post) so your earnings won’t drop drastically and you have time to get that back from your new blog.

Usually a blog less than 6 months can move to a new hosted domain without much effect on traffic. Do a quick checklist of the above and see where it leans more. Better to have your blog suffer earlier on than regret it later.

What are the main factors to consider before moving a blog from a free hosted site?

The main factors are the blog's age, total posts, PageRank, traffic, and revenue.

Why is the age of the blog important when deciding to move?

Older blogs have more inbound links, which are lost during a move unless you contact each linker.

How can you minimize traffic loss when moving a blog?

Check traffic sources like search engines, feeds, and link referrals to estimate expected loss.

React to this article:

16 Comments

byteburn · 20 years ago

I have just moved out from Blogger into my own domain using WordPress.

blogger is hard to customize based from my experience. with wordpress, things are really nice and there are a lot of themes that are free.

Manuel Viloria · 20 years ago

The sooner you move from your free site to your own domain, the better.

Don’t worry too much about the many years or posts you have previously invested, or the PR4/PR5 pagerank you’ve achieved.

You can always post weekly in your old site about the changes in your new site. You can also edit old posts and indicate the location of your new site.

What’s more painful is sticking with the old site and not having any control on its continued existence.

Want to raise the PR of your new site? Continue writing useful/informative articles. Adding a podcast will help, too. :-)

vance · 20 years ago

well ako, i have no problem with moving my blog, actually kakamove ko lang last month then went back to my old host (nagsara yung webhost na gamit ko). Ngayon i’m looking for a web host na free hehe, with no ads like what i’m using pero sana around 5 gigs ang monthly bandwoidth like 5gigs have kaso lang sign-up ngayon ang 5gigs.

Well most comments naman nareretain kung idependent host ang gamit mo yung may cpanel and phpadmin para makuha mo yung database mo and transfer it to a new host. aside from that may freeware na can change the url inside te databes para gumana ang site.

traffic is also no problem with me wala naman nagbabasa ng site ko so ok lang.

Aaron · 20 years ago

I just transfered my blog from blogspot to a wordpress hosted blog.

Decision was not hard since only my friends are reading it.

kukote · 20 years ago

tama, ang hirap iwan ng blog, lalo na kung PR4 na sya at ang dami nang links.

kutitots · 20 years ago

mahirap nga yan. lalo na if isa sa determining factors for picing ng blog ads mo is your PR rank. kung bagsak PR, bagsak rin ba presyo?

i actually had a similar problem before on kutitots. kaya lang, it was on the web host transfer. i lost all comments, although i was able to retain the post with their categories intact naman. pero kahit na diba?

i guess if you’re willing naman to have a “fresh start”, then moving won’t be an issue.

by the way, Abe, we have a problem :P paki-check email mo… how do i contact jason ba? hindi pa sya reply sa email eh

eric · 20 years ago

ako din.. when i was offered to move to a hosted site, medyo nag alangan ako kasi ayoko mawalan ng traffic and the search engine visibility.

buti na lang madali ako naka recover from this after migriation.

thanks abe!

jhay · 20 years ago

This reminds me of the migration I made when I got the free .com.ph domain + hosting. A PR of 4 is really hard to let go. I did a permanent redirect but rebuilding a new blog to measure up to the old one isn’t a walk in the park.

Still, the prospect of moving opens up new opportunities as well as challenges. The journey so far, has been fun and very rewarding, frustrations are just the spice of things.