Traffic plunges from WordPress.com site to my self-hosted version

christopherwink-wordpress-stats

One of the very obvious and very frustrating results of transitioning from my WordPress.com hosted professional site to this beauty is the loss of all that Google juice.

While it is certainly nothing for the record books, the old version of this site was very steadily growing its traffic, at a healthy 7,259 page views in May (as seen above), the last full month I operated that version.

Once I directed my ChristopherWink.com domain to my own servers, the archives that I migrated from my old WordPress.com version to here are without any links. Instead, their WordPress.com cousins continue to have the priority in search engines and in incoming links (which, because I didn’t use domain mapping, almost surely directed to christopherwink.wordpress.com, instead of just christopherwink.com).

So right now, my old site is still pulling 150 or more page views a day, currently more than I am here. Of course, that traffic will continue to wane there and, the hope is, slowly build here, even though I managed to lose quite a few RSS subscribers in the transition too.

While it was long overdue to become self-hosted and fully launched under my domain, I’m not going to get entirely over the loss of traffic to archived posts, which still get actual meaningful comments from time to time.

I have a lot going on, far beyond the transition here, but I do expect to post more about the transition from a WordPress.com hosted site to a self-hosted WordPress.org-style version. I think it’s a fairly common practice that is under discussed on the interwebs and I now have some thoughts on.

At the very least, I have a new project: to follow that nice arc of growth from my old site and well surpass it.

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