Well, since I’ve just moved from Blogger to Wordpress I guess it’s fitting to post about how to actually change platforms without much hassle.
First of all…
Firstly if you are on a custom domain on Blogger and want to move to Self-hosted Wordpress on the same domain, I advice you first create a Wordpress hosted blog and import your posts into it. Luckily for me, a few days before I transferred the domain I created a free Wordpress hosted account to get used to the control panel and how to make your way around it, I also imported my posts into it which proved really worthwhile.
Generally you should be able to import posts from your Blogger blog to your Wordpress account without a hassle, but I guessed there was some sort of conflict once the domain was transferred which made the import function from my former custom Blogger blog unavailable. With the imported posts I made I was able to import the posts from that while I had to individually cut and paste a few posts which weren’t on that Wordpress blog.
If you are on a free Blogspot domain though and are looking to move to Wordpress you shouldn’t have that problem.
Hosting
It would be advised to host your domain using one of these Wordpress recommended Web Hosts but I went with GoDaddy. They too have a simple installation procedure for Wordpress and takes care of the dirty work for you.
What to expect
Well, with the self-hosted Wordpress I expected the functionality and flexibility to be virtually unmatched and totally efficient but I was wrong. As much as it is quite a bit efficient it still doesn’t give the total flexibility that Blogger provided, i.e. the sleek control panel where you can dance around with page elements and add HTML just with a click or two (I really miss that!). When it comes to adding code in your Wordpress template you have to modify the code directly in the PHP files itself and generally if you modifying a theme directly it can bring a few weird outcomes.
Looking at the good side, the plug-ins are just amazing…as expected all you have to do is paste a small PHP file in your plug-ins section of your web directory and activate the plug-in and just like that you can add so much more features and functionality to the blog. (In Blogger, either you don’t have these features or you’ll probably have to modify the code of your template).
The Template
This was basically the worst part of the transfer, selecting the Template. I tried several themes a few would be the I3 Theme and the Vertigo theme and a few others I can’t remember but based on the elements I planned to have on the blog I wasn’t really able to fit it all in, it didn’t really fit, I found this theme in a post on DoshDosh. The post has an excellent list of themes which you should look into if you are planning on monetizing your blog.
Everything Else
Once your blog has been transferred there are a lot of other problems which you may come across like your feed URL for instance and your permalink URL format. I will explain how to get around the rest of the problems in different posts (didn’t want to cram it all up in 1 long boring post) and list them below.
By the end of the day though I don’t regret that I moved to Wordpress because once you are done with fitting in all the Plug-ins you need, and settle with a suitable theme and positioning for your blog, you’ll probably be satisfied with your new blog. Also I’ll have to warn you, you’ll see a sharp temporary drop in traffic because your old indexed URL’s would all result in 404’s [You'll no longer have to worry about traffic dropping and 404', i figured out how to get around these problems, scroll down and check Part 2 out!]
Also, another thing I noticed is everything you need to know and all tiny problems which you may come across is available online, either in a blog, in the Wordpress documentation or in its forum so there isn’t much of a problem. Finding the info and implementing is actually the main problem so to cut that miserable part out of the whole process I thought I’ll wrap it all up in a few posts over the next few days.
Update – I decided to have the rest that is needed to know as a Part II of the Blogger to Wordpress post:
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[...] Blogger to Wordpress Part 1 [...]
[...] Keeping it simple – This deals with what to expect, initial problem encounters, choosing a proper host and [...]
[...] Blogger to Wordpress Part 1 [...]
Blogger to wordpress is a pain for me although I love wordpress, but I’m still using Blogger.
Armand’s last blog post..Tips Meningkatkan Traffic Rank Alexa
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I suggest you move to wordpress though if you are looking to take your blog to the next level as it provides much more functionality and once you’ve done the hard part of moving to wordpress you won’t regret it.
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