Moving from Blogger to Wordpress

Not content with moving myself across the globe, I recently moved my blog from blogger to wordpress. If you’re not a blogger, couldn’t care less about this stuff and only came here for some travel pictures and a glimpse into another part of the world then head over to posts on Tango Lessons in Buenos Aires, the salty city of Marseilles or read a bit about France’s Speedo Fetish.

 For those of you considering making the same move – read on.

 First off, why bother?

I changed because I wanted more control over how my blog looked and what I could do with it. Also, as I researched technical tips and tricks online I found a lot more help available for wordpress than blogger.

 Was it hard?

Well, yes and no. It wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe. Wordpress now makes it pretty easy to import all your posts and pictures from blogger in a few simple clicks.

However, the main problem with the switch involves keeping all your links and hard fought for search engine status (the post name changes with wordpress – and I haven’t been able to override it manually to the old post titles.) Although I read about various plugins (programs you can download to help run your wordpress blog) that were supposed to overcome this problem – I couldn’t get any of them to work properly.

Luckily, most people had linked to my homepage, which didn’t change. Unfortunately I had to go back through my blog and reformat all the broken links that linked to my own posts. The broken linkchecker plugin helped here – but it was still tedious.

I also found lots of blogs that told me that I’d have to reload all of my images – although I didn’t need to in the end.

The other snag is subscriptions – if you already use feedburner then you won’t run into many problems with this. If you don’t, then you will have to tell your subscribers that their subscription address is about to change and that they need to change it as well. Not everyone can be bothered to do this, so you may well lose some subscribers…

 Sounds dull. Can’t I get someone else to do it for me?

Absolutely – there are loads of people offering to move you across for a fee. I did it myself (because I’m like that!) so I can’t vouch for their services but the following people were friendly and approachable when I looked into it:

Rent-a-geek                                      Dream Website Academy

THE DIY OPTION

The first hurdle to cause confusion is that wordpress.com and wordpress.org are very different entities despite having similar names. Wordpress.com is a free way of getting a blog or a website and I’d recommend signing up and having a play around with that first to see if you like the way it works. However, it’s free for a reason as you’re fairly limited in terms of how much you can modify your blog.

That’s when you move onto wordpress.org. For this, you MUST

a)      Pay for your own domain name (eg the domain name for Inside the Travel Lab is www.insidethetravellab.com)

b)      Pay someone to host your site (I use bluehost)

Step by Step Instructions

What you need to do will depend on where you start (own domain name or not) and how much you care about preserving your old work.

I found this guide on How to Move From Blogger to Wordpress by JD to be incredibly helpful, with a few tips from Andy Didyk as well. Both give the kind of ‘bare bones’ approach that I love, but if you’re after more structure then try Heather’s post on project planning for your move.

So am I all settled in?

Not yet. I’ve still got to put my pictures on the walls and work out where the local takeaways are. But it’s already starting to feel like home.

Any other tips, tricks or questions?

Drop them in the comments below. And good luck!