…from Blogger to WordPress. It’s hard to believe I stuck with Blogger so long! I loved Blogger, but they kicked all FTP users off. I’m happy for that because it finally forced me to make the move and it’s great for Bloggers’ business (why use so many resources to support such a small sub-section of their clientele)?
It actually feels kind of like a real life move.
THE GOOD:
- Updating WordPress is WAY easier. I used the self-hosted FTP version of Blogger, which means anytime I want to update anything on the main template, my ENTIRE site is erased from my server then re-uploaded via FTP…EVERY SINGLE TIME.
- Customization and Plugins: There’s a plugin for pretty much anything on WordPress.
- Migration was easy with the newly improved Blogger to WordPress tool (included with WordPress). There was also great 301 re-direct method I used (Shout out to Adam for notifying me of this helpful BlogBloke post). It’s not perfect, but it worked about 75% of the time to re-direct old posts to new posts (like this).
THE BAD:
- Adsense revenue went down from roughly $12/day to $3/day (probably because I currently have one ad instead of three).
- I can spot a WordPress blog from a mile away. They all have a relatively generic feel to them, even the cool looking and highly personalized themes. The Blogger template felt old, clunky and ugly…but it was unbelievably easy to navigate the site I felt. I’ll try to add some of the user friendliness back in.
- Traffic dropped just slightly since people across the internet were getting to my site via broken links….but this is just a personal blog so who cares. You can always access the old NevBlog by taking any URL and adding /old right after the nevblog.com.
I purposely got a template that maintains a relatively narrow reading area because I like reading like that. The old Blogger template let me have images:
The new WordPress template can handle images only slightly bigger:
Anyways, enough blog talk. If you see any weird issues, please notify via comments. I’ll be continuously updating the template for the next week, but feedback is greatly appreciated!
-Neville
—UPDATE—
Small interesting side note, while trying to quickly finish up this post, the library closed and I got locked in. Me and a homeless guy had to break out of the library!