Blogger To WordPress | 5 Reasons Why I Made The Move + How You Can

Like I mentioned in my comeback post, migrating from Blogger to WordPress has been on my to do list for the longest time and I finally ticked it off a few months ago.

A couple of people have asked me why I moved from blogger to WordPress and I know that making the Blogger vs WordPress decision is one that almost all bloggers have to make at some point -whether it’s at the beginning or somewhere along the line of their blogging journey.

When I first started blogging about 4 years ago, I didn’t have any specific plan or goals for my blog. It was just a way for me to share my interests and thoughts so I chose the easy way out, which was Blogger for me at the time and that worked fine for that phase of my journey. It was easy to understand for a novice, was free and looked pretty enough. But when I decided that I wanted to build my blog and treat it like a business, I soon realized that there is only so much I can accomplish on blogger and just how limiting the platform is for growth, so I had to make the move from Blogger to WordPress.

I’ll be sharing the top five reasons why I actually made up my mind to make the switch to WordPress and How you can move from blogger to WordPress without losing any traffic. You can also consider this a WordPress vs Blogger post.

Blogger Vs WordPress? Starting A Blog And Not Sure Which Platform To Use? Check This Out! Click To Tweet

Let’s dig in

My Top 5 Reasons Why I Made The Switch From Blogger To WordPress.

1. Better Blog Design.

If you use blogger, you should know that the struggle to find really great professional looking and a responsive theme is real. Blogger has a very limited selection of blog themes which was one of the first things that started to frustrate me with blogger when I decided to start blogging seriously. I had a particular design in mind and I just couldn;t get that on blogger. Most of the blogs I saw with something similar to what I wanted were either using WordPress or square space. You can find tons of perfect, professional themes with WordPress with even better support for the theme as well.

Let;s not even go into how hard it is to tweak or add features to your site with blogger if you’re not a techy person. sigh*

2. More Control Over My Site.

This wasn’t an issue for me at first but when I started reading stories of people who google/blogger had their blogs shut down because google decided the blog was a spam, I knew I had to take this a bit more seriously.

Of course, it isn’t exactly a common occurrence but to avoid stories that touch the heart, I decided that it will be better to just own my content. Blogging under blogger or the free WordPress(wordpress.com), your blog and content technically aren’t yours.

3. SEO Optimized:

I talked about how I now optimize all my posts for search engines in my post about my updated 7 step process for quality content and moving from blogger to WordPress had a big role in this. Unlike Blogger, WordPress comes integrated with and offers so many SEO plugins which help you create keyword intensive titles, descriptions, and posts. Not only does this help ensure your post is optimized for search engine as you type but also helps ensure that your post is readable too.

4. E commerce integration.

When I created my blog planners, I started thinking of ways to create an online store for it or have the store integrated with my blog. Finding a way to do this on blogger required loads of coding knowledge and was just so stressful. With WordPress on the other hand, all I had to do was install the woo-commerce plugin and I was good to go. So yes, in case you didn’t already know this, you can now shop the Cassie Daves Blog Planner right here on the site.

5. Plugins

Most of the points I’ve already mentioned, you would notice how I mentioned “plugins” in almost all of them. This is one of my fave things about WordPress!

I remember when I was still using blogger, there were so many things that I would see on other blogs that I couldn’t get on mine because it required more technical knowledge. For example the click to tweet button. I wanted to have that so I had to just hack it with a backyard route which was so stressful but now all I have to do is install the click to tweet widget.

My Top 5 Reasons Why I Moved From Blogger To WordPress + How You Can too! Click To Tweet

How To Move From Blogger To WordPress.

It actually took me some time and a lot of research to finally decide to make the switch to WordPress. I guess I was afraid of the change, having to learn to use something new and of course the fear of losing my traffic and comments as well.

So how can you move from Blogger to WordPress without losing your traffic?

1. Hosting

You’ll have to decide on what hosting platform to use. Web hosting is simply the place where your blog lives online. Using an analogy from Andy Traub, web hosting is the land and your domain is the address of your house. I went with Bluehost which costs 3.95$ a month because that’s what was recommended to me and I saw that a couple of big bloggers that I Love also use Bluehost. I had a rough start with them because during my migration process, I got shut out because Bluehost thought they detected some security issues and it took me a while and lots of emails to them to get it back up but it’s been glitch free since then. There are other hosting platforms like GoDaddy and HostGator.

2. Buy A WordPress Theme.

Obviously, your blogger theme can’t work on WordPress, so you’ll have to purchase a WordPress specific theme. Finding one I loved wasn’t hard at all but definitely expensive. I settled for this theme which cost me 49$, although I found out later that I could have gotten a way cheaper and similar theme if I had searched a bit further on themeforest so don’t be like me. Use ya eyes

3. Migrating Process.

I have zero skills when it comes to techy things and coding. I also did not have much time on my hand and didn’t want to mess my site up by migrating myself. There are lots of great tutorials out there on the migrating process from blogger to wordpress like this one, so you can DIY it yourself using that.

If you’re like me though, you can totally outsource this and hire someone knowledgeable to help. There are lots of sites that offer blog migration services but I decided to go with fellow blogger Modavracha to help with my migration and I don’t regret the decision.

She walked me through every step and had everything moved over (Including my comment and traffic!) without any glitches so I’ll definitely recommend her to you. Check out her blog migration services HERE.

Here's How To Easily Migrate From Blogger To WordPress Without Losing Your Traffic Or Comments! Click To Tweet

The one thing I don’t like about WordPress is how hard it is to track your traffic if you don’t want to use google analytics. Unlike the blogger stats page, where you can easily view your traffic at a glance, WordPress is a bit rudimentary and stressful. You just have to use google analytics!

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t integrate my blog with google analytics when I was on blogger for about 3 years or so so my stats on google analytics started counting about last year. Since I now have to depend on google analytics to view my traffic, you can imagine that my count starts with just the traffic of last year *sigh*

I was very close to a million views on blogger so you know how real the pain is that I won’t get to see that 1million written out plainly for me soon. It’s just a thing of the mind for me though because I know that I’ve surpassed a million views now, except that I can’t see it. So that’s a lesson for you, If you already don’t have your blog(whether blogger or WordPress) integrated with google analytics now, please do that ASAP!

What platform do you use for your blog? Blogger, WordPress or Squarespace? If you made the move from blogger to WordPress too, how’s that going for you?