How to drop “wordpress” from your blog address
April 2, 2008 by adpuma
Why bother? Because your blog looks more personal with its — that is, your — own name in address. Because you can move it to another platform without confusing your readers or search engines too much. Because Yourname.com contains the information you want your readers to know and omits details that don’t matter. Who cares if it wordpress, or blogspot, or whatever else.
To change yourname.wordpress.com to yourname.com you need to purchase yourname.com domain or map your blog at wordpress to the existing one. Complete instructions can be found on http://wordpress.com/ main page under Advanced tab on the top right of the page. It is a WordPress.com premium feature. Domain and mapping cost $15 a year, mapping to the existing domain $10/year. The process is fairly straightforward, the most complicated part is DNS resetting. Don’t repeat my mistake — if you consider purchasing domain for your blog, check if the name you want is available and register it with WordPress.
- In your blog, go to the Options in the top menu:
- Under Options choose Domains:
- Enter your domain name there prompted:
- If you registered your domain with a registrar other than WordPress, you will have to edit nameservers for your domain in your original registrar. WordPress’ prompt gives you proper names to replace with. Adpuma.com was registered with Yahoo.com. In Yahoo you have to go to “Domain control panel” page (you will need to sign up) and choose ”Manage advance DNS settings” option on it.
- It takes up to 72 hours for changes to propagate. In my case it took about 30 minutes. You will be prompted to pay with WordPress credits. They can be purchased via PayPal, 1 credit= $1.
Great article. There are even more reasons to do this than you mention. I talk about a lot of the reasons in a recent blog article - but you should use your own URL for SEO reasons, as well as just the ability to move and control your blog how you want to. You’re the one doing all the hard work - you should own and control your blog, and that means the URL.
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/3994/Launching-A-Business-Blog-Avoid-This-Common-URL-Mistake-at-Blogspot-and-Typepad.aspx
checking out your blog, twitter friend.