Table of Contents
Why?
There was a time when I was interested in hosting websites myself. I bought a cPanel hosting package from Godaddy. You would get a free domain with it, so I choose baswijdenes.com.
Because I also wanted to know more about Content Management Systems, in short CMS. And in specifically WordPress, I created a subdomain baswijdenes.com/portfolio/ to test it out.
This is how the blogging started.
With this process I made a number of mistakes that I never liked.
- Everyone is automatically redirected to www.baswijdenes.com/portfolio.
- I didn’t immediately start with an SSL certificate, which means that https:// in the admin portal did not work correctly. I had to use a plugin to fix this. I don’t like using plugins when I can do it myself.
- /Portfolio says nothing about the content I blog. It sounds more like some Photographing career website.
- Eventually even “tutorial” in the title started to bother me because I only made System Administration blog posts, so I wanted to shorten this to IT.
This has always bothered me a little, but I have never taken steps to change this.
Until now! I have been looking for the right domain name for my new blog for awhile now.
I wanted to find something that fit the name better, so first I bought BWTB.co. This sounds perfect, right?
Not quite. I didn’t like the .co. This is a Colombian domain extension and even though it is said that SEO wise this doesn’t matter, I didn’t go for it.
Finally I came across .blog. This would perfectly match my name, and how funny is it that the makers of WordPress manage this TL domain extension?
I thought of BWIT.blog:
- BW stands for my initials.
- IT makes it abit more specific
- The full domain name will be Bas Wijdenes IT Blog.
I purchased the domain last week and I have completed the migration this weekend.
https://BWIT.blog is now live!
What will happen with your content on baswijdenes.com?
I’ve migrated all the content from baswijdenes.com over to baswijdenes.com.
I left the URLs the same, which makes a 301 permanent redirect from baswijdenes.com to BWIT.blog easy.
All you have to do is make an adjustment in the .htaccess in the main folder (/portfolio/).
These re-directs will stay until ‘the end of time’. You don’t know which websites commented your URLs and therefore I can’t remove the old websites.
- What is .htaccess?
- What are 301 permanent redirects?
What about your SEO?
I created BWIT.blog at Bing and Google webmasters. This ensures that the largest search engines see this new domain.
Everything is permanently redirected to the new URLs. This is automatically seen by search engines as ‘the content has been moved to a new domain’.
There will be a temporary drop in viewers, but as soon as Google picks up BWIT.blog as the main domain for the content, I quickly return to the original number of viewers.
Website statistics
Here are some quick stats from my website.
My blog is live since February 2015.
Total views:
- Users: 529,733
- New Users: 529,725
- Sessions: 605,002
- Page views: 719,164
- Unique page views: 632,739
- Average time on page: 00:05:41
- Top country: En-US 313,787
Blog posts:
- Total blog posts: 155
- Microsoft blog posts: 134