On Friday night, I stumbled upon an excellent article by MamaBlogga that provided 10 easy steps to migrate from a Blogger Platform to WordPress. She made life much easier with the migration. I had been considering making this move for quite some time, but wasn’t sure how or if I really wanted to do so. I love Blogger, but felt a bit limited in some ways. I also like to provide blogging tips and had no previous experience with WordPress, so I have been wanting to learn about it. Now that some of the headaches are out of the way, I wanted to share my initial thoughts.
The Good
- High Quality Themes: WordPress has an amazing assortment of visually appealing themes, which far surpass that of Blogger.
- Plugins: The assortment of plugins is unbelievable. It reminds me of the iPod App Store. There really is a Plugin for just about anything you could ask for.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): In addition to the tagging and categorizing ability, there are extensive listings of plugins that can greatly improve your search engine results.
- Statistics: I love statistics and WordPress has excellent built in features and available plugins to track visitors, visited posts, etc.
- Import, Export Functions: Importing my Blogger Blog and Comments was extremely simple and quick. It was a matter of me clicking on my WordPress Dashboard, Settings, Import, selecting Blogger, and then clicking Transfer. Couldn’t be easier.
The Bad
- Visual Editor: I am not a fan of the formatting functions provided when creating a new post. As I was typing this post, it kept trying to format and double-space. There’s probably an easy way to change this, but I’m now using Word to write this post.
- Adsense Integration: I found a ton of Adsense plugins, but couldn’t get them to display after configuring them. I tried just posting the code and had the same problem.
- More Complex then Blogger: This could be a pain for those who just want a simple way to post their content. For example, to get extra widgets, you’ll have to first install a plugin, add the widget, and then configure settings (for some widgets).
- Plugin Compatibility: You have to know the Version of WordPress you have when searching for plugins. Many plugins are not compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
The Ugly
- Broken Links: I spent the entire weekend fixing broken links, since WordPress and Blogger create Post URL’s differently.
- WordPress is Free, but it’ll cost you money for hosting: Blogger is free, but with WordPress you have to use a Hosting Service. I used BlueHost and it cost me approximately $94 for 1 year, based on the options I selected.
- Social Bookmarked Posts May Be Lost: This is something I never really considered. Since Blogger and WordPress do their links differently, I lost some of my biggest traffic sources, i.e. a few Stumbled Upon and Digg submitted posts.
Overall, I’m very happy I finally made the switch, but should have planned it better. I didn’t realize I’d have so many broken links to fix, but luckily I used the broken links plugin and redirect and fix the links. Now that the site design is complete, in the next few posts, I’ll be sharing some of my favorite plugins and themes I found while tweaking the site. I hope you enjoy the new layout. It was frustrating, but also pretty fun.
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