Blogger to Wordpress think about it first! Part 1

A lot of people start blogging on free platforms like Google's Blogger.  And why not?  It's free, it's reliable and you can run ads to your heart's content.  Heck, they even have adsense integration built right in! But, there comes a time when a move to a platform like Wordpress may be prudent.



This is Part one of a multi-part series (don't you just hate that?)  We'll go over the reasons I jumped over to Wordpress in this installment.  Future editions will include:

• Part 2: The benefits of Blogger (if it ain't broke...) 
• Part 3: The Downside of Moving and Wordpress limitations
• Part 4: Making the Decision to Move or Stay
• Part 5: My Moving Story.  If there seems to be interest I'll migrate this blog to Wordpress and document my journey.

Why'd you move from Blogger to Wordpress?
I moved my main blog over to Wordpress in December and have been generally happy with the move. There were a few reasons for my move:

• More technical control
• Much better SEO
• A little afraid of Google
• Widgets!
• Less code hacking

Having more technical control meant that I could do a better job of managing my site.  I could use 301 redirects to help when I moved stuff around, something not possible on Blogger.  You can do quite a bit with Blogger by hacking your template, but having direct control makes many of those tasks easier.

It's also much easier to optimize a WordPress site for search engines (SEO).  Blogger does a few things that puts you at a disadvantage with search engines like not being able to control your URL structure or even have unique descriptions for posts.

I'm also just a little afraid of the big G.  Google could shut down my site at the drop of a hat on a whim, especially if they mistake you for a spammer.  My main blog isn't spam by any stretch, it's one of the best places out there for e-cigarette reviews and news.  But, that particular field is crowded with spammers, so my fear was being swept under the rug with the riff-raff.

I pretty much started the blog to provide a legitimate source for that type of information.  However, I'm constantly faced with sites like Squidoo and eZine Articles who just blanket ban the topic.  I didn't want to get killed by Google for the same arbitrary reason.

Widgets are a great feature of Wordpress.  You can pretty much do anything in the world with them.  On top of that they are easy to install and many are free.  I had a lot of the same functionality with Blogger, but it took countless hours of research and hacking the template files to get things to work right.

In general, I'm glad I moved to Wordpress.  It was a pretty involved process, and there were certainly some gotchas (I'll talk about those in future installments).  However, the improvements are worth the headache (to me).  

More importantly, I noticed a pretty substantial jump in search engine results once I got everything setup correctly.

A word about hosting

As a side note, I'm referring to what's called self hosted Wordpress.  You can set up a free blog on Wordpress.com but there's limitations.  I signed up with a company called Host Gator because a friend recommended it.

I've been quite happy the company so far.  They have one-click installation for Wordpress which made it easy to get started.  They're also pretty inexpensive which is nice. More importantly, even the cheap plans offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space.  That's particularly important for my other blog since it's constantly growing.

If you're in the market for a hosting provider, you could certainly make worse choices than Host Gator.  Even better, HostGator gave me a coupon code to share!  Get 25% of your plan with code SKW25OFFGATOR. Go to this link to sign up (don't forget the coupon!)

Until next time

It turns out the decision to move over to Wordpress from Blogger takes more words than I have planned.  In an effort to do this right, I'm going to make this a multi-part afair.  Stay tuned for the next installment where I'll cover the benefits of using Blogger as your platform.

Disclosure: yes, the HostGator links are affiliate links.