Is it worthwhile registering/adding a domain name to my Wordpress blog?

July 24, 2013 6:23 PM

I've been publishing a blog for a couple of years on Wordpress. Whenever I log into the dashboard, I'm informed that my domain "is available to be registered and added to your blog. (You can use it as your blog address.)" support page on domains is here. Are there any drawbacks to registering it? Will all the widgets work the same way? Will my SEO be effected? Will my wordpress followers still be subscribed? What else should I consider? It's a small blog updated with a couple lengthy posts each week; about 300 subscribers and 500 page views per day.
posted by bookley to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: So, for example, your blog is bookleyblog.wordpress.com, right?

Wordpress is informing you that bookleyblog.com is available to purchase.

I can't speak to SEO, people's bookmarks, your RSS feeds, etc.

But in terms of Wordpress followers, you're good. Widgets, blog appearance, and other within-Wordpress settings should be fine.
posted by Sara C. at 6:26 PM on July 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: If you own the domain at some future point you can move your blog to another service without changing names, losing your readers, etc. For $10 a year it's a no-brainer. I would assume Wordpress.com is set up to automatically manage the transition to your domain on their service without casuing any issues with your site.
posted by COD at 7:42 PM on July 24, 2013 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I did something similiar very recently where I change the domain for my wordpress from a Webfaction sub domain to a proper domain, i.e. I went from foci123.webfactional.com/blog/ to foci123.com. The issues I encountered were:

* down time: it takes a couple of hours for the DNS change to propagate during which you probably can't access your blog or its admin.

* broken links: if you have manually linked to other posts, tags, categories or images in your posts, these links might break. Solving this was was pretty easy using some SQL code.

I don't know if these issues apply in your case because Wordpress.com might work differently from host-it-yourself Wordpress.

SEO might be affected depending on how Wordpress.com handles the move. The sane thing on their behalf would be to do a 301 redirect on all URLs for your sub domain in which case your rankings won't suffer that much (redirects cause a slight initial drop in rankings but they usually go up again), but you might have to check this with Wordpress.com.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:15 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]