So far so good Blokesters. The move over to WordPress has been pleasant for the most part but not without it’s nuisances either.
Probably the hardest part for me was deciding on what type of theme that I wanted. But once I made the decision there was no holding me back.
Admittedly there’s been a fair amount of work involved with learning my way around the WordPress dashboard, tweaking and debugging the new theme, choosing which plugins to use and deciding on colour schemes etc. But that goes for anything new, and so far there’s been no major issues.
The Good:
- Moving from Blogger to WordPress was relatively painless. I first imported it over to my Wordpress.com account. Then I exported it as an XML file to my desktop, which I imported back into this blog account. It took me about only 15 minutes to accomplish.
- I can’t believe how fast Google has indexed this blog. I’m already getting search engine referrals. Amazing! WordPress really is SEO friendly.
- Working in WordPress is a pleasure. The flexibility and ease of use is a powerful combination. The dashboard is clean, without all the annoying graphics that Blogger has… thus making it less cluttered and easier to use.
- I can now edit comments. I now have trackbacks without having to add third party software. I can add thumbnails to my post excerpts. I can publish my posts at a future date and time. Categories and tags are a breeze and more powerful… and much more.
- WordPress is indeed POWERFUL! With the proper use of PHP it can become a dynamic content management system.
- Because New Blogger is relatively new it doesn’t feel as matured as WordPress does. WordPress is also free from all of the bugs and encumbrances that New Blogger is riddled with.
- Working in the Blogger editor interface was full of quirks that don’t seem to be an issue in WordPress. Things like making bullets, blockquotes etc. required a lot of finessing in Blogger. Whereas WordPress seems to work perfectly. I should also mention that the WordPress built-in post editor is so much more powerful.
- I love the fact that I can just upload a plugin to do automatically what used to take me a lot of effort in Blogger. Things like for example making “Related Posts“. Searching my blog for relevant posts, copying and pasting the links are now done automatically with WordPress. What a time saver.
- No more trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear — WordPress makes things like smart permalinks so easy, as compared to Blogger which required lines and lines of code to hack. In fact, to make Blogger more like WordPress the entire code had to be hacked either by HTML tricks or javascript, which ended up slowing down the loading of the page and corrupting it’s xhtml compliance.
- I am now truly the master of my blogging destiny with my own top domain and WordPress on my own server. No more limitations and no more Google/Blogger shoving its paranoid agenda down my throat.
- And of course last but not least: The prime motivation for me leaving Blogger — comments are now on my post page. No more annoying multiple clicking just to leave a comment. BONUS!
The Bad:
- All of my internal links are still pointing to the old blog. If I want to change it I will have to go through every one of my old posts to correct it. That’s just too much work as far as I’m concerned and so I will probably just live with it (at least for now … anybody up to making a plugin).
- During the import stage my more popular posts that have tons of comments were truncated at around the 50 comment mark.
- About the only thing that I’ve missed from Blogger is the ease to add widget page elements, but there are also plugins that you can get for WordPress that will do the same thing.
The Ugly:
- I’ve lost my backlinks. The only way I can fix it is if everyone who has ever linked to me will make the correction. Hint
Of course there are techniques that I can use to mitigate some of the more adverse affects of moving such as page rank, but I will discuss that in another post.
No regrets. No solution is perfect but the benefits of moving over to WordPress far outweigh the bad.
What are your experiences with moving over to WordPress? Or perhaps you have a valid excuse reason(s) that’s holding you back from making the move! Let me know.
