Domains

Contents

• Get Started!
• Setting the Primary Domain
• Important Notes Before Upgrading
• Transferring a Domain to WordPress.com

Related

• Add Email
  • Add Email through GoDaddy email hosting
  • Add Email through Google Apps
  • Add Email through Network Solutions email hosting
  • Add Email through other providers
  • Add Email through Outlook.com
  • Add Email through Yahoo! Small Business
  • Add Email through Zoho Mail
• All About Domains
• Cancel Domain
• Change name servers
• Custom DNS
• DNS Zone Records
• Domain Expiration
• Domain Management
• Map a Subdomain
• Map an Existing Domain
• Move your domain to another host
• Register a New Domain
• Transfer a domain to another registrar

On WordPress.com, you can use a custom domain for your blog (such as yourgroovydomain.com) instead of the default address you get when you sign up (like yourgroovysite.wordpress.com). This is called Domain Mapping, and it’s a paid upgrade:

• Registering a .com, .org, or .net domain through WordPress.com and mapping that domain to your blog starts at $18.00 per domain and per year, or $25.00 per domain and per year for a .me domain. For $8.00 more, you can also make the domain registration private.
• Mapping a domain you already own costs $13.00 per domain, per year.

Get Started!

• Register a new domain through WordPress.com. Follow these instructions if you just want a custom domain for your blog, and you want to do it as quickly and easily as possible.
• Map an existing domain (one you already own) to your WordPress.com blog. Follow these instructions if you already have a domain that you registered elsewhere, and you want to map that domain to your blog.
• Map a subdomain (for a domain with an existing website) to your WordPress.com blog. Follow these instructions if you already have a website, and you want to add a blog to it under a subdomain (such as blog.yourgroovydomain.com, for example).

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Setting the Primary Domain

It is possible to map several domain names or subdomains to a single blog. In this case, you’ll need to choose one domain as the primary. All other domains associated with the blog will still forward to the blog, but the address that appears in your browser’s address bar will always switch to the primary domain. A common use for this functionality occurs when a domain name is frequently misspelled. You might like to own both the correct and the incorrect spellings, but you would want to assure that the correctly spelled name was set as primary.

To set the primary domain for your blog, navigate to Store → Domains in your admin sidebar, select the radio button beside the domain you wish to set as primary, and then click the “Update Primary Domain” button at the bottom of the list to save the change. The change should occur immediately, though for very recently purchased domain names, there is sometimes a delay of a few hours between the purchase of the domain and its availability.

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Important Notes Before Upgrading

• Advertising: While a blog must have a mapped domain in order to qualify for WordAds, the Domain Mapping Upgrade does not otherwise permit advertising on your blog.
• Same Terms of Service: The Domain Mapping Upgrade does not permit the use of any kind of prohibited code or upload additional themes or plugins. With the upgrade, your blog will still be hosted here at WordPress.com, which means that you will not have FTP access to your files and you will still be required to abide by our Terms of Service.
• New URLs: If you add domain mapping to an existing blog with posts, their URL’s will change. We’ll redirect any visitors looking for the old URL’s over to the new ones, so none of your visitors will get lost out there on the internet, but other services won’t always understand that the old links and the new links point to the “same” place. For example, Tweet counter widgets work based on particular URL’s, so old posts’ counts will be reset to 0. Once you make the change, future posts will not be affected.
• Common Domain Questions: Learn all about domains and the answers to questions like: “What happens when my domain expires?”

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Transferring a Domain to WordPress.com

We do not currently accept incoming domain transfers. If you already have a domain and you want to use it with your WordPress.com site, follow the instructions for mapping an existing domain to your WordPress.com blog.