Domain Registration and Mapping
It’s here: you can now use your own custom domain with your WordPress.com blog. For example, if your blog was currently at example.wordpress.com you could buy example.com from us and we would automatically move your blog over and redirect all your links and readers to the new domain.
How does this work? Well to get started go to Options > Domains. You can enter the domain you want in the box at the top.
If the domain isn’t registered, it will ask you for some information and then register it for you, and add domain mapping, for $15/yr.
If you already own a domain you registered somewhere else, you can map it for $10/yr. The next screen will tell you how to change the DNS nameservers on your domain to point to WordPress, and once you do that your domain should be live within a few hours.
That’s it!
This is pretty new, and somewhat technical functionality. If you have any questions at all don’t hesitate to contact support using the feedback tab at the top-right of your dashboard, and one of the team will get back to you immediately. Congrats to Andy for his great work on this oft-requested feature.
Posted: Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 3:25 am. Filed in Domains, Features, New Features, WordPress.com.
Oct 24th at 3:40 am
Alright, getting 10 bucks out and doing this now!
Oct 24th at 4:03 am
super du-awesome! I wanna I wanna this for christmas!
Oct 24th at 4:12 am
Pretty fancy, Andy. I can see this being a pretty big feature. I started a WP.com blog so I could blog about WordPress, so it doesn’t really make sense to me. I like having “wordpress” in my blog’s URL!
Oct 24th at 4:20 am
Great job guys! Question: could you buy and map to something other than “example.com”, or is it limited to the wordpress.com subdomain currently being used?
Oct 24th at 4:20 am
Ummm…What about International users? PayPal I suppose
Oct 24th at 4:24 am
I would do this if I had the means to.
Oct 24th at 4:27 am
Is there a way to pay for that which does NOT involve credit cards or Paypal (which need a credit card for you to register)? Cuz some of us bloggers are not, like, up on that credit card thing…
Oct 24th at 4:28 am
The other post mentioned that some random blogs will be given new domains from wordpress… is that happening? Will I get it
Oct 24th at 4:38 am
Awesome feature.. been waiting for this =p
Oct 24th at 4:53 am
Great, I will do it!
Oct 24th at 4:55 am
This is my graceland sir.
Oct 24th at 4:55 am
Exactly what are the advantages of having your own domain? Will your blog be more search engine friendly?
I don’t really understand …. yes I am having a dumb moment!
V
Oct 24th at 5:01 am
Sankar, it’s happening. I got the first one (and don’t I feel special!).
Oct 24th at 5:07 am
Gr8.. Thanks..
I’m not able to access this URL “https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr”.. How should i do???
Oct 24th at 5:10 am
Cool.. Thanks.
Oct 24th at 5:13 am
I don’t own a domain anymore but if I decide to in the future it will be here. Thx!
Oct 24th at 5:34 am
Cool. What about our subscribers? Does their RSS sub get lost for them when we make this move or is some sort of redirect feasible?
Oct 24th at 5:40 am
YDS, good question. Your WordPress domain (“example.wordpress.com”) can be completely different than the domain you map it to (“crazypants.invalid”).
Oct 24th at 5:41 am
Hey guys! This is great!
But I’ll keep my .wordpress.com domain =) I like it!
Oct 24th at 5:47 am
livingjourney, there is no technical advantages. It is an image thang.
Also, horror-upon-horror, if you ever wanted to leave WordPress.com, you would not have to change the URL everyone already knows your blog as.
Oct 24th at 5:53 am
Gail Ann Williams, Andy has worked long and long
so the important details like RSS subscriptions keep on truckin if choose to domain map.
Oct 24th at 6:48 am
This is so cool.
Oct 24th at 6:50 am
why can’t we have domain.info??
Oct 24th at 6:52 am
What happens with services where we have registered the worpress.com URL or with our (shudder) Google page rank?
I assume we need to re-register and lose PR, but just wanted to check what the implications are.
Oct 24th at 6:53 am
0nkulis: we are having some issues with domains outside of .com .net and .org. You will be able to map any domain soon; we aren’t going to support registering them here, but you can still use them if you register them with another registrar.
Oct 24th at 7:09 am
Bravo, WordPress Domain Registration and Mapping a reality…Thanks:-)
Oct 24th at 7:21 am
Question about Andy’s comment above. I’ve got a .co.uk domain registered elsewhere. Can I map my domain across now?
Oct 24th at 8:32 am
Some people have reported a custom domain getting more search engine referrals than a wordpress.com subdomain, but honestly I think they should be about the same.
Oct 24th at 8:34 am
With regards to the earlier comment about Google Pagerank, it will probably go down for a couple of weeks, but since we have the redirect it will come back. Also all of Google’s links to your old site will work just fine when people click them.
Oct 24th at 8:35 am
Great news today! Although I think I will keep my wordpress “tail”. It is much cooler this way
Oct 24th at 9:18 am
Great work – very impressed! Only issue is it seems that there’s an issue around logging in – I no longer get the ‘bar’ across the top of the screen using my new domain name (which was working within minutes of ordering!), I click ‘Login’ and am taken straight to the admin panel – so I’m clearly logged in already, it seems the admin panel still uses the .wordpress.com address, so I wonder whether this is what’s causing the conflict…
Other than that tremendous – decent price for the domain name too, given that you’re doing the directing too!
Oct 24th at 9:23 am
Thanks Andy, I allready registrated onkulis.com and 0nkulis.com from wp… thanks for great service…
Oct 24th at 9:23 am
Awesome! Just got myself one..
Oct 24th at 10:12 am
hey wordpress¡
this new feature rox all our sox¡
i wanted to ask u one favour..
wordpress bloggers cannot use anything to show “online” visitors..
eg: 46 online
i think this would be a really wonderful enhancement to all the sexy ywordpress sidebars, something to think about?
Oct 24th at 10:16 am
how about css. is it included in that price
Oct 24th at 10:24 am
Yeehaa! I’ll be doing this. A great feature for a great price.
Question: will changing to a new domain name mess up our Google search hits, or our Google rank? For some reason I’ve got a Google rank of “5″ right now, which I can only guess is because my blog is associated with WordPress. Once I switch to a new domain name, I lose all those positive associations and my Google hits drop, yes?
Oct 24th at 10:44 am
I keep trying to register the domain i want but it keeps saying “something went wrong, contact support” what do I do? who is this support, how do I contact them?
Oct 24th at 11:02 am
Matt, if we map it to our domain I assume we can still access it from the wordpress.com url (foo.wordpress.com)?
Oct 24th at 11:48 am
i don’t understand
Oct 24th at 12:06 pm
Now this is simply AWESOME. Guess I will buy soon 2 domains from you guys. Just need to verify what are the payment options, as I am in Moscow.
Oct 24th at 1:00 pm
Very impressive!!! I’m doing this!
Oct 24th at 1:17 pm
You made my day!!! Thank you!
Oct 24th at 2:53 pm
I have a site that’s hosted elsewhere. I can forward this to my site? So it will be my domain name without the wordpress.com at the end?
Tx,
Henrietta
Oct 24th at 2:56 pm
If I register a domain through WordPress, whose name will it be in? Will there be difficulties if I ever want to move the domain elsewhere?
Oct 24th at 3:40 pm
I might do this ince I’ve owned a domain for about 7 years… I’m a bit concerned about what would happen if I decide to stop mapping… what would happen to all the links? Would they just end up defunct?
Oct 24th at 3:54 pm
^^ This is what I want to know before taking the plunge.
Oct 24th at 4:08 pm
You guys rock, I’ve set mine up and it works perfectly! thanks again for making such a great service even better
Oct 24th at 4:11 pm
Is there a guide more complete than this post?
I mean, something that explains in more words…
Oct 24th at 4:42 pm
Yay! http://www.beatsentropy.com
Paypal can work with debit cards as well.
Oct 24th at 4:45 pm
When you register they ask you for your real name, address, phone number.
This is what a WHOIS lookup returns:
http://www.whois.net/whois_new.cgi?d=beatsentropy&tld=com
It looks like it is registered to your real name
Oct 24th at 4:46 pm
Ok, you can get full registration information based on the domain here
http://who.securepaynet.net/whoischeck.aspx?Domain=BEATSENTROPY.COM&prog_id=391143
Oct 24th at 4:46 pm
The domains are registered in your name with the details you give, and if you ever want to move it elsewhere you are completely free to!
Capt, you can contact support by using the “feedback” link in the top right of every dashboard page.
the forester, like I said in my earlier comment, your old domain will redirect to the new one so all your pagerank and links and visitors will transfer to the new domain over time.
Rushi, you can still go to foo.wordpress.com, it’ll just redirect you to your new name.
Your dashboard will always be on WordPress.com, so that way we can secure your passwords with SSL.
Oct 24th at 4:55 pm
Made the change today, the transition is seamless. Excellent work. Another reason among many to love WordPress.
Oct 24th at 5:08 pm
kewl.
Oct 24th at 5:48 pm
It’s working really good! Thanks!
Oct 24th at 5:51 pm
I’ve been waiting for this feature, thanks!.
Oct 24th at 5:51 pm
woohoo!
Oct 24th at 6:05 pm
Баясгалан, customizing CSS is still a separate upgrade.
Oct 24th at 6:08 pm
My blog got deleted once, because I had links to my companys home page and some ads in it. Is it ok to display ads, when I use my own domain?
Oct 24th at 6:16 pm
Tauno, the same ToS apply, so today that still means ads are not allowed.
Oct 24th at 9:21 pm
Sounds really neato, I think a little more documentation is needed here, cause I’d like to have a bit more knowledge about this before I plunge on in!
Oct 24th at 11:13 pm
I grabbed a domain via your new system earlier today, and it worked flawlessly (as usual).
Yet again, awesome work. You folks really do rock.
Oct 24th at 11:30 pm
What is exactly is mapping?
Oct 25th at 12:33 am
I just opened 2 new blogs that I’m not ready to start using now, just so I could buy the new domain names that I want to have.
It was pretty smooth. After purchase, you might want to add a line to the directions indicating how long people should expect to wait before it’s working (only a few minutes; but it doesn’t hurt to know that before trying it).
Also, on the new domains, I don’t have the menu bar on the top of the page for dashboards, new posts, etc. I need to go to login to reach the dashboard, and I don’t see anyplace with a menu of all my dashboards. Not a big deal.
Oct 25th at 3:25 am
hmmmm should i? shouldnt i?
Oct 25th at 4:47 am
Yippee! Finally no need to go host hunting if I want my own domain name! Add another added upgrade to customize your blog and I’ll convert!
Oct 25th at 5:44 am
I purchased iowaboyblog.com today and it redirected within moments. The process was flawless and fast. However the ‘www’iowaboyblog.com isn’t working. I noticed, while visiting other sites who purchased and redirected domains today, that their sites are redirecting to example.com even when I use the ‘www’ prefix. How can I get this ‘www’ redirect to work on my site?
Oct 25th at 6:38 am
Update: I should have waited for the propagation to complete before asking. My ‘www’ redirect is working now. Thanks WP team for making the redirect process so easy.
Oct 25th at 9:10 am
Like others have said, I am quite proud of having wordpress.com in my domain so I think I’ll leave it! But nice feature anyway.
Oct 25th at 12:36 pm
Excelente!, sin embargo estoy de acuerdo con Mark Jaquith: no cambio por nada el “.wordpress.com” de mi blog, no tienen idea lo mucho que algunos apreciamos y valoramos esta palabra en nuestro blog. De todas maneras me parece una buena opción para muchos. Felicitaciones.
Oct 25th at 1:36 pm
I’m on it! Thanks, WordPress Wizards!
Oct 25th at 1:46 pm
Thanks! I’m so excited!
Oct 25th at 3:39 pm
I got a domain via your new system last night and it went excellently smooth! Thanks for the hard work and the great feature!!!
Oct 25th at 7:30 pm
Even though it costs much more, I’d rather pay for you guys to host than download WordPress onto my server because when it comes to anything programming, I’m stuck. I have another domain which I’ll be hooking to my own server soon, (a friend will be helping me), but that is going to be for my work and I want this to be something completely separate and unrelated. Hehehe, and having a pseudonym is cooler.
Oh, and to everyone else, I’d rather have my own username than a subdomain…:P
Oct 25th at 8:15 pm
WordPress.com Now Does Domains
Things just keep getting better for WordPress.com users. Back in August, the WordPress crew unveiled the custom CSS upgrade for WordPress.com bloggers. Now, WordPress.com users may use their own domain or register a new one to pair with their blog. Th…
Oct 25th at 8:38 pm
cool.. .