Almost a year ago, I thought I’d try out WordPress.com as an alternative to Blogger. One of the irritations with Blogger was the inordinate amount of time to publish a post or republish your entire blog. That, coupled with the fact that the Blogger servers were a bit on and off. Apparently still the case.
Soon after signing up with WordPress.com I registered a domain name, for the first time, after about 10 years of using the Internet. Subsequently I couldn’t connect it to this website. D’oh! That is until the great guys at WordPress enabled domain mapping to free WordPress.com accounts.
For a piddling 20¢ a week (US$10 annually) my domain was finally mapped to my blog today.
To be honest, there were a few issues with the WordPress.com nameservers that required support but I’m happy now. For a free/low-cost service, WordPress support is friendly and speedy – thanks to Mark and Barry at WordPress.com.
Anyway, here are some tips on the process.
Tips for Those Considering Domain Mapping
- If you don’t already own a domain name, go for the WordPress.com combo offer of a domain name with a side order of domain mapping for US$15/year. I thought the cost of my domain from Namecheap (highly recommended) was low at US$7.99/year. My annual cost will be around US$18.
- Thoroughly read the FAQ on Domain Mapping. If you own a domain, you must change the nameservers to WordPress.com before you do anything else, like pay for the upgrade credits.
- Be patient. I wasn’t. The DNS propagation takes time; anywhere from 24-72 hours after you change the nameserver settings.
- There is no notification from WordPress.com that the DNS side of things is ready and that you can then pay. As the FAQ suggests, perform a DNS Lookup on your domain name. If there are no red or yellow boxes* against the Parent and NS categories, then you’re good to go!
- If you need it, there’s more help here and here via the Forums.
- Still wondering if it’s worthwhile and if there’s any downside? Read this.
* There will be some red boxes against the email categories (MX and Mail) as domain mapping at WordPress.com does not enable email via your domain name.
Let me hear about your experiences. Scribble a comment.
ARKHITEKTON 
I totally just did the same exact thing that you did…ported over from Blogger to WordPress because of that article on Pingdom and Techcrunch as well as my growing dislike of Blogger over the years. Glad to see it went well.
Thanks Jeff. Still manually moving posts from “old” Blogger as WordPress.com only imports from “new” Blogger. Hopefully others might find my tips useful before they map their domain.
actually, i had the old blogger, but temporarily switched to a standard template and hosted it on blogspot.com. Then I imported all the posts from blogger, redesigned everything, and then switched my domain over to wordpress by changing the nameservers. the theme is standard, so I only paid for domain mapping…! thanks for the comment…
Of course! I wondered why when I did a temporary switch to Blogspot it didn’t work – my template was customised (and published via FTP). So the WordPress.com import from “old” Blogger works. I’ll give it a try.
mine was published via ftp too…the only thing that I’d have to warn you about, is if you want wordpress to host your site with the same URL as before, copy over all your files because you won’t be able to since the nameservers are different.
I don’t get it, I own a domain name, but why in the heck would I wan’t to buy additionally 10$/year for redirecting mydomain.org to mydomain.wordpress.com? it’s ridicilous.
Well Jan, if you’d rather not pay for domain mapping, yet you own a domain name, then you are probably paying about the same amount annually for hosting.
With previous experience of hosted websites (dating back to 2001), I didn’t want the overhead of maintaining code (eg. the full version of WordPress) for Arkhitekton so I could focus on the content. That’s why I chose WordPress.com this time.
The redirection (20¢ a week) is seamless and fully conceals the *.wordpress.com URL, as you no doubt noticed when arriving here…
My friend on Orkut shared this link and I’m not dissapointed at all that I came to your blog.