The_Grue

You don’t need to do anything to do with moving. Everything stays exactly as it is right now. The upgrade does all the redirecting.

The benefit is you stay part of the wordpress.com system – with tags, their search, no need to upgrade things etc – but readers see your url.

In a year, when the domain mapping upgrade runs out, or when you feel the need for new plugins/themes which you cannot get at wordpress.com then you’ll need to move things. But until then just get the upgrade and carry on exactly as you have been.

It would help to know where these sites are and what theme you are seeing. Then we can look and tell you what we see?

Where does this say your site is?

https://www.whatsmydns.net/

This could be your browser/system caching old results. Do you have a browser you hardly use which you can try going to the site on?
Are you on Windows/Mac and have you tried flushing the dns cache?

What you should do is use the Domain Mapping upgrade at wordpress.com
That will keep the blog where it is, no links break, all your traffic and search stuff gets redirected nicely and then in a year once everything has settled down consider moving to your actual domain.

To do this, you need to create the subdomain blog at your webhost. Note: what you wrote above is a subdirectory
photographerinessex.com/blog
A subdomain will be
blog.photographerinessex.com

This should help:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/map-subdomain/

I know this is spending money but as nothing breaks and traffic stays the same it’s very probably worth it.

Have you tried uninstalling all the plugins, then reinstalling and testing one by one?

Or

Rename the plugin folders one by one and see what happens?

You need to narrow this down to one plugin.

Is removing all of them an option?

You mean https://websiteurl ?

There can’t be a plugin to solve gamification because only your site has those rules – you created this ‘game’ which people are now playing. If this were mine I would stop the process, examine just how people were doing it and then block/change to prevent it.

But this is not a WordPress issue. It’s an issue with how people are using your site, not how the code is performing.

If you look on page 2 or 3 of the _options table (look for the > at the top to page through) you will see the home value

Do you have access to phpmyadmin?

That link is going to

https://www.zgexperience.com/www.zulqarnaingroup.com/?utm_source=ZG+Experience&utm_medium=Header+Link&utm_campaign=ZG+Experience

How are you entering that link right now?

In phpmyadmin, browse the _options table.

Look for the site_url and home values.

Are they correct?

This isn’t really a WordPress problem. It’s a social issue. So this forum won’t be able to help.

Not sure where I’d post to ask about this one, sorry.

Can you access the site using an ftp client?
Or a cpanel?
If so, rename the .htaccess file which will probably be in the same directory as wp-config.php Just call it htaccessold

You might need the ftp client to ‘show hidden files’.

That should help. Post back if it does not?

“Firefox can’t find the server at https://www.trendinggoodies.com”

That suggests that the nameservers for the domain (which are where you bought it) and not linked to where it is hosted (hostgator).

Can you check your registrar (where you bought it) and see what they have? If that is also Hostgator send them a Support and they should be able to fix that.