Migrating a wordpress.com site will take you longer than thirty minutes

A couple of weeks ago my girlfriend told me that she wanted to install Google Analytics on her wordpress.com blog. Unfortunately, you can't install analytics without upgrading to the business plan which is a whopping $24.92 a month. She had plans to monetize her site in the future (ads?), which isn't possible with the personal plan.

So I told her that she should consider a self-hosted site. In fact, it's so easy I could do it for her in less than an hour.

I just finished.

It took over a week.

Here's what I had to do:

1. Create an account on a new hosting service 
2. Install wordpress through cPanel using a temporary domain name
3. Import content from old wordpress into new wordpress
4. Install Jetpack after realizing that none of the shortcodes were working
5. Install Google Analytics (FREE)
6. Transfer current domain name registrar over to new registrar (This process takes FIVE days)
7. Buy a SSL certificate (got it for a dollar/year thanks to discount holla)
8. Update DNS nameservers for domain (Takes about a day to propagate) to point to new host
9. Update hosting plan to use current domain name and turn on SSL
10. Replace WP database references to temporary domain using 
11. Optimize the site with the help of Google PageSpeed because the site was slow AF. Went from a page speed score of 40 (ah!) to 96 (yay) by using a combination of plugins:
1. autoptimize
2. wp super cache
3. wp asset cleanup 
4. speed up javascript to footer
5. speed up optimize css delivery 

Finding the right combination of plugins was a bit of trial and error. Some claimed to work but didn't. So I had to keep inspecting the page source and running page speed to test whether or not the plugins were making any difference to the site performance. 

Done!