Switching from Blogger to WordPress

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Having only ever owned blogs on Blogger, it never really occurred to me that I would switch to WordPress (WP) but here we are, I’ve done the deed – no more procrastinating! 🙂

What had changed my mind? Talking to other PF/FI bloggers!

I liked Blogger as it was free and I’d worked with it for many years. I know you can get free WP blogs but well, I was switching so thought I may as well go all the way and get it hosted properly!

I was actually going to wait until the new year but the timeline had to be sped up as someone spotted the new blog (yes, looking at you, TFS haha!) and I wanted to minimise confusion.

How was it?

With someone like M on hand to help out, it was pretty painless. She sent me some useful links, videos to watch, websites to check out. I unfortunately didn’t heed her advice to test out WP before I transferred my entire blog (got a bit impatient!)  but it wasn’t so bad in the end.

My posts transferred ok (apart from one) but some of the formatting went to pot and I lost my Pages. Nothing too drastic.

As I didn’t know how confident I would be in WP, I’ve just used a basic theme template, which I may just stick with – no need to go all fancy-pants.

siteground

My blog is being hosted by Siteground*, which M recommended.  It’s the first host I’ve ever used and I must say that I’m impressed so far.

Within minutes of me purchasing my plan, I received a welcome phone call from a member of their customer services team, asking me if I needed any help – as a matter of fact, I did as I’d managed to lock myself out and needed a password reset, haha!

On another occasion, I had some questions to ask regarding my website domain and their online chat was very helpful and answered my questions quickly, so as a newbie to all this website hosting stuff, I would highly recommend Siteground.

Anyway, I’ve gone for the basic StartUp package, which costs £3.30 (inc VAT) a month – I’ve paid for a two year package.

A few months back, I had secured the domain name ‘quietlysaving.co.uk‘ – this was transferred to the host, et voilà, the blog you see today! If I’d not secured the domain  name already, I could have gotten it for free when I purchased the StartUp package – oh well, live and learn!

Using WordPress

Blogger was very easy to use but somewhat limited. WP, on the other hand is very versatile, the many plugins mean there are loads of things that I wouldn’t have even thought of adding to my blog. After just a few days (a fair number of hours!) of tinkering about with it, I’m already quite at ease with things.

I’m not saying that I’m going to be some kind of whizz with WP but I’d hope to be a little competent at some point. Seems to be loads to learn and read up on but I think I know the basic stuff now.  I have had to call upon some of my limited html knowledge (dusted off after 20 years!) for some basic formatting and tweaking of posts; probably not absolutely necessary to know but useful in any case.

There are still some things I’m likely to experiment with, eg menus and suchlike but nothing too radical.

I didn’t want to change my blog appearance too much – for what it’s worth, it’s like my brand!

Am I glad to see the back of Blogger? Yes and no. Yes, because there’s so much more I can do with my blog on WP. No, because my FI journey started with Blogger, so there are some good memories there. Onwards and upwards, as we say though!

Anyway, here’s hoping for trouble-free blogging so I can continue to document my journey to FI! 🙂

 

[*referral link]

23 thoughts on “Switching from Blogger to WordPress”

  2. Nice site Weenie.

    Is this a wordpress.org or.com site?. I am in the process of setting up a blog myself at present. I have an existing website with 1&1 and am playing about with a test wordpress.org blog on there. I was looking at bluehost as they get a lot of very good reviews (or most likely they pay the best commission for referrals) but will check out siteground.

    Good luck

    Richard

    • Thanks Richard.

      I log in via the .com, which was what Siteground downloaded. I’m afraid I don’t know what the difference is between .org or .com.
      Bluehost is one that I’ve also heard good reviews on. Good luck with the blog, look forward to seeing it! 🙂

    • Hi Richard,

      As Weenie is using an external host, it’s a wordpress.org site. WordPress.com means that it is hosted on their servers, which come with various limitations. I’m currently hosted at WordPress.com and have to pay to have my domain mapped there. The cost of the domain mapping and the domain name itself is probably more than Weenie is paying for hosting! Hosting elsewhere gives you tonnes more options and flexibility.

      Also, nice switch Weenie. I’ll be looking to switch my main site (and start my financial independence one) to hosted in 2016 so I’ll definitely check out Siteground.

      • Hi Adam

        Thanks for the clarification. I had thought that because I log into WordPress.com to update my blog, that it meant that it was a .com site.

        Thanks for the kind words and good luck with your switch and your new FI blog!

  3. Nice one Weenie!

    Glad to hear it went smoothly. Did you get the domain separately then? always a good idea to keep the domain registration separate from your hosting with a big registrar so if the hosting company goes pear shaped or you get into dispute you can be up and running in pretty quick order by changing some settings in your domain control panel.(and of course you have kept regular backups of the site including wp database and code files)

    One plugin I’ve used to keep sites fairly secure is Wordfence – you’d be amazed how many bots there are out there trying to hack simple word press sites!

    You say you lost some pages? how did you get your data from the blogger site? some may be recoverable if you have a back up in some form or another… or possibly via the Internet Archive’s wayback machine

    • Hi MikeS

      Thanks and yes, I bought the domain a while back (not long after the gathering up in York as there was a conversation about Blogger vs WP then!)

      Thanks for the headsup on Wordfence, I’ll add that one to my suite.

      I didn’t so much as ‘lose’ pages, they didn’t get transferred over at all and M confirmed that this seems to be a common issue. It wasn’t so bad though, I just created new pages in WP and copied and pasted the ones I wanted to keep. I used the Blogger to WordPress plugin to transfer the site over. All went well apart from my last Blogger post which for some reason didn’t go over even after a reload so it was another copy and paste job, I just lost the comments.

      All in all, I’m happy with how it’s gone, I thought it would be a bigger job.

    • Ooh, yes please – drop me a note, M! Really grateful for all your help – I’ll buy you a drink at the next FIRE Escape you can make…or bring a couple of home brews for you! 🙂

  7. Congrats on the completion of the move!

    +1 for wordfence, my blog got hacked a while back but haven’t had any issues since I installed that so for now it must be doing it’s job I guess 🙂

    Other “essential” plug ins: some sort of spam comments blocker, antispam bee or akismet are the most used out there I think. Also “Stop spam comments” is amazing at, erm… stopping spam comments 🙂
    Also try SABRE (Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine) which will stop bots registering to your blog and making you think you have like 3000 subscribers when none of them are real 🙂

    If you like footnotes as I and many other bloggers do I would recommend “Simple Footnotes” (which provides anchor link to the note and back again)

    If you want a blog roll on the right similar to what you had on blogger then “WP Social blogroll” is good

    Those are the main ones for me but anything else is personal preference. If you spot any good ones let me know 🙂

    Cheers and have a fab Christmas!

    • Hi TFS
      Have got Wordfence up and running now and already using akismet. I’ll check out the others over the weekend.

      I like the scrolling twitter you have, but not sure if the compatibility is right, I might just try it and see.

      Cheers and all the best to you and Mrs T!

  8. Well done – looks good!

    > If I’d not secured the domain name already, I could have gotten it for free when I purchased the StartUp package – oh well, live and learn!

    Don’t ever get your domain name at the same place as your hosting, you did well not to. The reason is that hosting is a low-value commodity business, it’s easy to fall out with a webhost and the business model is fragile. If you got your domain through them then it’s harder to move, whereas with independent name service it’s a simple case of clickety-clack on the DNS records and 24 hours later you’re right out of the clutches of the old webhost.

    Conversely, the lock in is of course the reason webhosts offer the feature, which usually only lowers your costs for the first year, but the lock-in persists 😉 It’s not impossible to get round, particularly with a .co.uk but it’s no fun.

  9. Congrat’s on the move Weenie!

    I love the new format, it looks in line with your old Blog, but just a bit slicker in my opinion. I’m glad the move was somewhat seamless.

    • Cheers Huw – I didn’t want to make the new blog look too different from the old one – ‘Quietly Saving’ might not be a huge brand but it’s my brand!

      Looks-wise is it slicker and updating it is so much more intuitive versatile than dear old Blogger! I’m sure there are lots of features that I’m not aware of but of the ones that I know of, I continue to be impressed!

  10. PS. I used Siteground on M’s recommendation for my online course, and like you I’ve been impressed with them so far!

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