I have been working on WordPress.com for a few years now, just dipping in and out of actually getting around to writing articles. Now I’ve ramped things up with the evolution to SocialDad.ca, I needed to be able to customize my blog.

WordPress.com is the iPhone of website builders. It looks smooth and it simply works, but don’t try and change anything. You can’t add any useful widgets or plug-ins. You can’t advertise, or really do much to monetize your site.

So, on to WordPress.org, which is has to be installed to a ‘host’. This took some very confusing research and I dived right in to the WordPress-approved BlueHost. It turns out that I signed up just as they were trying to figure out a mass outage, taking lots of the sites who use them, offline. Yikes.

I tried to migrate my website through the BlueHost dashboard (which is a mess of buttons), and eventually gave up. After a breather, I chatted with a few fellow bloggers, and they recommended SiteGround.com. 

Wow. Just Wow.

So, this is the ‘Easy way to move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org’. Go to SiteGround.com. On Sunday morning, before I signed up and paid my $50 for the year of hosting my beloved website, I was able to go onto a live chat with one of their Tech Support. Ivan, my new best friend, walked me through the whole process, from setting up my account, migrating the blog from .com to .org, and set up the temp site which is now live.

After that was all settled, I needed to ask another question at 8pm (again, Sunday!) I was joined by Michael, who gave me the answers. No messing around, just friendly 24/7 service.

I realize that this sounds like a sales pitch, but when you find a product and a company that is so good, it creates brand-love, and that’s hard to find. Just click the pic below and get your blog working for you.