Migrating from Blogger to Wordpress – My Experience

Are you considering moving your blog from Blogger / Blogspot.com to Wordpress? Here is my experience with blog migration.

I bought this domain back in November 2008 and made the move in June 2009, so it wasn’t an overnight experience. That said, it doesn’t need to take 7 months either. I was dragging my feet, worried about losing the community of people I enjoy visiting with.

Moving URLs can either be a blog boost or it can prove to be blog suicide. People are stubborn about changing bookmarks and updating feeds. If you decide to make a move with your URL, make it easy for your community of friends to move with you and redirect your old URL to your new one. Alternatively, get someone to help you keep your same URL or research how to point the CNAME record to your new host yourself.

One thing to note about Wordpress is that if a blogger has invested financially in his or her space, you can probably guess they are in it for the long haul. It’s not as likely they’ll up and disappear one day, like you see all the time on Blogger. Generally speaking, people tend to value things more if they invest in it, or perhaps the opposite is true… people are willing to invest in something they care about. Self-hosted wordpress isn’t free – so some thought and investment has been made by the blogger to be there. This gives your blog some credibility.

Questions and Answers about the move:

Why did you leave Blogger? Should I leave Blogger?
Blogger is a fantastic platform for narrative blogs. If you tell a story and your content flows chronologically, it’s a great fit for you. Oh, and it’s free. Sometimes, it’s just hard to say no to free. I left because, one – I was already paying for the hosting. As a blog designer, I have several test blogs on Wordpress to set up client spaces. Two – I wanted the pages. Having pages is a feature missing from Blogger. When Blogger and IE had some trouble communicating in spring of this year (2009) – that was my exit cue. You’ll soon see others following suit, too. People who depend on blogging to support their families cannot have an entire browser of people unable to load their blogs. Regardless of how many times we say Internet Explorer is an inferior (read, POC) browser, 30-40% of people still use it!

Why did you choose Wordpress over Typepad, Squarespace or LiveJournal?
I use Javascript for some of my design tricks like slideshow headers on photoblogs, and Squarespace won’t take it. I made a Typepad account and didn’t like the way widgets worked. Both Blogger and Wordpress are easier and more compatible with more 3rd party widgets and applications. At the time I was doing research, something like 78% of the Top 100 Blogs were run on self-hosted Wordpress. Usually, that kind of success isn’t an accident. It takes some research, and a platform well-suited to handle pretty much anything. In the end though, it was just personal preference.

Is having a Wordpress blog expensive?
You will pay between $6 – $12/month in hosting fees. Usually the farther ahead you pay in advance, the cheaper it is per month. But that means buying 2+ years of hosting ahead of time in one big chunk. That’s not budget-friendly for every family. The average cost for shorter-term payments is about $30 quarterly or $100 – 120 a year. The Wordpress program is FREE – what you are paying for is the host. You will also need to purchase a URL, which will run you less than $10 a year.

Um… what’s a host? Do I need a host to use Wordpress?
Yes. If you use self-hosted Wordpress – and that means Wordpress.org NOT Wordpress.com – you need to find and pay for a host. I use and recommend Dreamhost. More on why later. What does a host do? It’s a lot like Photobucket or Flickr. Only instead of uploading pictures – you upload the whole blog program. Your host offers you FTP – which is a technical term for a place to park your junk – and you pay them for the storage. It’s sorta like the digital equivalent of those ugly garage-like storage units that hold people’s stuff.

So WP uses themes, not templates, right? What theme is Life with my 3 Boybarians built on?
Yes, Blogger uses “templates” and Wordpress calls them “themes.” M3b is on Thesis by DIY. I like Thesis so much that I became an affiliate and get a little kick back when you click through my link. I picked Thesis, even though it had a bit of a learning curve for me, because of its reputation for out-of-the-box SEO. It’s a smart theme, and while I am used to working in CSS on a stylesheet, Thesis works nothing like that. But you know what’s cool about Thesis? It has forums that are incredibly helpful. While I was building another one of my blogs for an upcoming road trip, the good folks at the Thesis forums were there to answer my questions, regarless of how inane they were. Good back-end support makes a HUGE difference! You can follow my affiliate link to check out Thesis for yourself. Not all themes are pay themes. There are plenty of very handsome free wordpress themes. Plug “free wordpress theme” into Google. You’ll see what I mean.

I heard you have to be really computer-smart to use Wordpress. Is it hard to learn?
That part may be true when it comes to installing Wordpress in your host’s root directory, messing with CNAME records, and changing file names. While it’s not much different than uploading photos to Photobucket or Flickr, it can be a little intimidating if you aren’t comfortable in those situations. Some hosts, like the one I use – Dreamhost (yes, another affiliate endorsement by me!) has a one-click install. You don’t need to mess with c-panels, have Dreamweaver to transfer files or anything. But not all hosts offer that – Bluehost, Bluedomain, Gator Host – those you need to manually upload and install Wordpress. It’s not terribly difficult, but it takes some know-how. Want to see the installation instructions for those kinds of hosts? Wordpress’s official set of instructions can be found here – Wordpress Codex.

After that point? Once Wordpress is installed, it’s not any more difficult than Blogger. And in my opinion, it’s much easier than Typepad or Homeschool Blogger. Adding widgets is easy – one click! And if you use Dreamhost, you can install the Wordpress updates and new releases with a single click, too. Trust me, you’ll appreciate that when it’s time to update and you don’t want to mess with with manually transferring files.

Here is Blogger’s post box, back stage:

And here is Wordpress’s new post page:

Both work generally the same, there is an editor, you can schedule when it posts, you can pick categories. Then Wordpress also has a place where you can add meta-data like tags to your posts. This helps Google know what your post is about, and helps match it with what people are looking for in their Google searches.

What drawbacks have you found with Wordpress?

• I think Blogger has a better sense of interconnected community. If you use Blogger, it’s very easy to comment and interact with other blogs on Blogger. I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to install Blogger-native Google Friend Connect on this blog. But it is such a wonderful community tool – especially if you don’t use a blog reader. There isn’t as much of the inter-linkedness (my own word!) that I’ve seen with Wordpress.
• Also – while I love love love that you have to leave an email to post a comment, I don’t love that it puts first-time posters into moderation. It throws people off when their comment doesn’t post right away. Still, it’s a setting and the moderation is only for the first comment. Once a reader leaves a comment once, they’re approved ever more. I do realize it’s comment-prohibitive for folks but it’s much better than word captcha. Yuck.
• This isn’t a Wordpress blah so much as a migration blah… but I’m still working on internal links. In my old posts, if I link to another old post, it still links to the old blog which redirects here, which is a nasty little loop.
• Hosting will be cost-prohibitive to hobby bloggers. While the features are admittedly better on Wordpress, not everyone can or will pay $120/year to blog. It’s a trade off… and in blogging you get what you pay for. Blogger really is “good enough” for many hobby bloggers. Professional bloggers or business bloggers will – hands down – find better SEO and more features for their investment on Wordpress.

I bought my custom domain through Blogger, can I install Wordpress on it?
Yes. Remember that bit about the CNAME record I mentioned above? You’ll need to research how to point it to your new host. What will happen is that your Blogger blog will go back to the original blogspot.com URL. Then you claim the custom URL and register it with your host. You change the settings on your google account from ghs.google.com to whatever your host wants it to be. This will very from host to host. You own the custom URL if you paid for it, so you can put whatever you want on it. Don’t forget to edit the RSS feed on your Blogspot URL to point to the new feed instead.

Okay. I want to make the move, but I don’t want to deal with hosts and stuff. Can’t I just pay you to do it for me?
There are many work-at-home parents, momprenuers and even official web programmer dudes who make a living dealing with all this stuff. Yes, I do offer Blogger to Wordpress migration and I’d love to work with you. So would many other talented web designers and geeks. If my design queue is too long or closed, I will recommend another designer to help you.

The short version?
Wordpress is an awesome platform if you can swing it. It’s probably time to consider upgrading if you’ve had trouble with IE users accessing your Blogger blog and you rely on your blog for income. Blogger is perfectly fine for most hobby bloggers as the compatibility issues are infrequent and quickly resolved.

These were the questions in my comments and email about my experience. If you have any others, please post them below and I’ll do my best to help you find the answer.