Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links.
The way self-hosting as always gone with me in the past is this: I create the WP.com account, blog for a little while, see if I enjoy it, and then import my blog to Bluehost. The blog is then connected to WP.com automatically, which means logging in is way easier than it would be if I had to do it from Bluehost.
This blog went differently for me, though. You’ve probably noticed this is actually a subdomain (meaning the extension is chelseyhartman.net, instead of just .net or .com). The reason I did this was to test it out, but NOT have to deal with going back to WP.com. Using a subdomain is free.
The problem? I couldn’t log in via WordPress. Even though I installed WordPress.org, my blog wasn’t connected to WordPress.com. This meant every time I wanted to access my dashboard, I had to go to Bluehost. Which is a surprisingly complicated and roundabout way of logging into WordPress.
After a few days of searching Bluehost for “how to connect my self-hosted blog to WordPress” (I really thought this was a normal problem), I managed to figure it out on my own. SO exciting. With so many of you wanting to begin at the self-hosting stage, I figure you might want to know how I did it!
Step 01: Log in to your Bluehost account, scroll down to “WordPress,” click that, scroll down to your list of domains, and subdomains, and click “Admin Login.”
Step 02: This should log you in to WordPress and take you to your WP dashboard. Unfortunately, I can’t show you anything else because I’m already connected and logged in. 😛 But you should see a message asking you to install Jetpack. Do that. This will automatically connect your self-hosted blog to your WordPress account.
And that’s it! You’ll sign in and everything and now you should be connected.
Did you self-host immediately or start with a free blog? Have you ever run into this issue? If you have and you use a different webhost, I’d love for you to guest post for me!
