Things I learned moving my blog to a new hosting service (it’s easy!)

Over the last few weeks you’ll may have noticed that I’ve been writ­ing and twit­ter­ing about mov­ing my blog from the .net domain to .com.

A few years ago I man­aged to grab BradGrier.com when it came open, but I’d not decided what to do with it until recently. I’d been hav­ing some per­form­ance issues (my blog, that is) and decided to test a new host­ing provider.

So, the issue. How to move the blog, keep the same look and feel, not lose any Google Juice, and not lose any feed sub­scribers. Not a trivial set of considerations!

Of course, I turned to my good friend Google for advice:

• How to Move Your Word­Press Blog To A New Web host­ing — great tech­nical advice on back­ing up and restor­ing your WP blog
• Use the Word­Press Data­base Backup plu­gin — I wrote about it recently when my blog crashed, but backups cre­ated with it are entirely suit­able for use in blog migration
• Redir­ect­ing incom­ing traffic to the new blog — well, since I’m using the same data struc­tures and permalink struc­ture, the only change is one from .net to .com, this was quite simple; a .htac­cess 301 redir­ect as described here and here. Slightly tech­nical, but not really too tough.
• Mov­ing RSS sub­scribers was also quite simple, since I use Feed­burner to man­age RSS sub­scrip­tions: simply change the Feed Title and Ori­ginal Feed URL on the Feed­burner Feed Details page. DO NOT CHANGE THE FEED ADDRESS as this will dis­con­nect your read­ers from your feed — a bad thing

A couple of other observations:

• Set up your new blog/destination site first. Com­plete import­ing your data and build­ing your look and feel. Yes, also duplic­ate post­ing to this site. You will want to make sure as your read­ers move they don’t lose any content…especially for the tardy ones.
• Imme­di­ately change the RSS Feed address in Feed­burner. Any new sub­scribers will never notice, as you are post­ing to both sites right?
• Prom­in­ently post about the fact that you are mov­ing your blog. Add a wid­get or two to the side­bar (make them obvi­ous) to alert your read­ers to the fact that you are mov­ing. You want them to begin to identify with the new URL, not the old one, as soon as possible.
• After a week or two, close com­ment­ing on the old feed, with a mes­sage dir­ect­ing read­ers to the new site.
• After another week or two imple­ment 301 redir­ects. And test them! @hownottowrite and @lijit both recom­men­ded, through twit­ter, this HTTP header scan­ning tool and Fire­Fox plu­gin to val­id­ate the redir­ects (thanks again!).
• Finally, remem­ber every place you’ve ever used the URL / Domain name, and change it.

So, after all that…did you notice?

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Blog, Blog­ging, Host­ing, Word­Press, Twit­ter, Tools, Util­it­ies