Move my wordpress.com site to wordpress.org - I have bought my hosting now what?

[ethelb]

I have had my own business since November, selling via Not on the High Street and it has been successful enough that I am now looking at setting up my own ecommerce website. I have read the other thread on this tonight (v helpful) but want to know how to transfer the website.

Do I:
Install wordpress.org on website (that's easy right?)
Buy ecommerce theme and instal (I think I can manage this)
Export current blog and install on wordpress.org site (HOW???? Plus how does it fit into the new theme?)
Set up sagepay or something (Which and HOW!!!)
Direct domain to new website (I can actually do this as I have done it before)
Make new website go live (how?)

The main thing I need help with is exporting the blog to the new website. The instructions are all written backwards. Plus, is my plan in the correct order?

Hosting is with your-name-here and domain is with 123reg, though I will renew it with your-name-here.

Get a wordpress.com site (it's free, and easy, but the site address will end ".wordpress.com"), then Go to your hosting account, hopefully they have a "Wordpress" option (mine did), set up a wordpress.org account and there is an option to export your wordpress.com site and import it to your .org site. The "Wordpress" doesn't appear in your .org site address.
Log into your .org site and install "jetpack" which makes it as easy to use as .com.
Hope that makes sense, take heart that if I managed it, you certainly can, I had no idea about how websites worked 6 months ago!

Thanks for your message but i am still v v confused. Where do I log in once I have hosting?

When I went through Fasthosts (my hosting provider) it walked me through the process. There are also plenty of YouTube clips showing screenshots of how to do it.
Perhaps you could search + "set up Wordpress.org"
The important thing is to set up a Wordpress.com site first so you can get Jetpack.

Thanks. I already have a wordpress.com site which is what I am trying to move.

Did you have to set up your domain for wordpress.org before you could do anything else?

I had a domain before I knew about Wordpress. If you don't have hosting yet you can buy hosting from Wordpress.org, it's less hassle. I took the route I did as I was already paying Fasthosts for hosting.

To export, there's a side tab on the dashboard called "export" (might be hiding under "plugins"), then when you look in the same place on the .org, there's an "import" button.

Thanks everyone. I have managed to log in now.

It seems that the problem was that I hadn't changed my name servers (I wanted to do this last so my website didn't have to go down for a day, but hey ho). I just did that and they changed almost automatically (odd but good, I was expecting to have to repick up everything tomorrow!).

Now I'm going to try the export/import thing. Wish me luck!

However, if anyone knows if I am supposed to instal a theme first do let me know!!

If you have a theme on the .com it should export to .org.

You will need to import your custom theme separately, or if you've been using one of the standard WP ones you can simply activate that. Go to the "Themes" section on the dashboard.