It’s not you Blogger – it’s me… (but it was totally you.) This past month I ended my relationship with Blogspot, and like any breakup, it could have gone a little smoother.
One night as I sat at my kitchen table trying to “trick out” my blog, I found myself underwhelmed with the offerings of the Blogger Dashboard. I also was hankering for a shiny private domain that would give my blog a little more authority (i.e. soupthereitisblog.com vs soupthereitisblog.blogspot.com). Since I didn’t have the coder-confidence to tweak any HTML or CSS codes, I was over it. So off to WordPress I went full steam ahead!
However, I truly should have done my homework ahead of time. The emotions that transpired over the rest of the evening went from excitement and accomplishment to doubt and regret in a matter of hours.
So here’s the first place I went wrong: poor research.
Instead of visiting Aichlee’s incredibly helpfup post on Blogger to WordPress migration, I went to Google and typed in “Migrating from Blogger to WordPress” and clicked through the first few results. I’m a total visual learner, so I ended up referring to labnol.org’s “How to Migrate your Blog from Blogger to WordPress” because it had a 5 minute video to help walk you through the process (visual AND lazy learner).
The second mistake I made was : Not understanding the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Being the naive blogger that I am, I was under the impression that the end all was wordpress.com I truly wish that I had referred to this page before I made the shift.
However, lack of foresight aside, WordPress.com was fairly straight forward in the signup process.
Registering my domain was also easy, although I had to compromise on my domain name. (I’m coming for you www.soupthereitis.com !)
I then opted for the WordPress.com for Beginners which didn’t require any fees (Premium for $99.00/year and Business for $299/year). I paid the $18.00 to register www.soupthereitisblog.com and felt giddy with excitement at having my very own domain.
So then it was time to move my content. WordPress is smart in that they make it really easy for you to migrate content from your old blogs. Just access the import function in Tools → Import → Blogger.
They even do you a solid and reference you to a Blogger Support page telling you how to export your blog from Blogger.
From here I simply dragged and dropped the URL at the top of the XML export page and saved it to my desktop. Jumping back over to WordPress, I imported the Blogger XML file and let WordPress process it for a few minutes.
Since my design template wasn’t anything special, I skipped the portion of the video that helps your export your design template. Instead, I browsed the WordPress templates until I found one that made my basic baby-blog look a little more sophisticated and mature.
So there she was, soupthereitis.com sitting pretty on her own domain and with a classy new makeover. Now it was time to alert my readers! This is where my feeling of remorse began to set in when I realized that WordPress.com doesnt’ have the redirect plugin that would automatically reroute visitors from my old blog to the new. Cue the womp womp womp music…
Because my audience is still incredibly small, I think I might be okay to delete my blogspot account, but it will be a total bummer for other AmpliFound readers who read older posts that link to the old blog. For now, all I have is a dancing poodle to direct readers to the new blog.
WordPress.com does offer “Guided Transfer” option in their Store that will move my blog over to WordPress.org, but it comes with a price tag of $129.00. But that seems a bit steep for a blog that still has low readership. But for now, those are the two options; delete the Blogger or fork over the $129. In the spirit of this being a joined learning experience, please feel free to offer any suggestions or insights in the comments below!
In conclusion, the moral of this experience is to always do your research! Had I taken the sage advice offered by our AmpliFound contributor Aichlee in her post on Blogger to WordPress Migration, I could have saved myself a few hours of work and protected my blog from some tough decisions.
