Comments on: Ten – wait, Eleven – reasons to switch to WordPress

By: car hire bruges airport

car hire bruges airport — Fri, 15 May 2009 03:51:01 +0000

Thanks, Daniel. You make the whole thing sound almost pain free. I've noticed the tubu.net has become quite popular of late. Is it just the price or are there other benefits?I really appericiate your ideas & i am totally with it.

By: VMaryAbraham

VMaryAbraham — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 05:18:19 +0000

Thanks so much, Daniel. The $60m question is whether a non-programmer can actually do all of this. I guess we'll find out soon enough. I'll keep you posted.

- Mary

By: Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel J. Pritchett — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:28:21 +0000

Here's a guide for automated per-post redirects from blogspot to wordpress. They claim it will preserve your SEO ranking!

I think you ought to go ahead and buy a domain name and set up your new WordPress blog when you get the time. Once you get it running ok, try and flip on this blogger redirect and see how it goes!

By: Mary Abraham

Mary Abraham — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:06:59 +0000

That would be great. It's a shame to walk away from the equity you've built in your blog. If there's a reasonable way to preserve it, we should definitely do it.

- Mary

By: Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel J. Pritchett — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 13:12:25 +0000

We should be able to set up some redirects to send old links through
blogger to your new site. Maybe I can try that on my own site as a
test.

By: Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel J. Pritchett — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 13:10:16 +0000

it's the $9 package as endorsed by Chris Brogan. Everyone else lookns
to me $5/mo. I'm sure there are other low-cost providers I just
haven't seen.

By: Mary Abraham

Mary Abraham — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 07:31:05 +0000

Daniel -

To be honest, this is the part that worries me the most. That Google ranking feels like a precious commodity. I've got about 175 posts in my archive and a fair amount of site traffic. And, a lot of that traffic seems to come via Google searches. It's the issue that stopped me from moving over earlier. Ironically, the longer I wait, the harder it gets.

- Mary

By: Mary Abraham

Mary Abraham — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 07:26:23 +0000

Thanks, Daniel. You make the whole thing sound almost pain free. I've noticed the tubu.net has become quite popular of late. Is it just the price or are there other benefits?

-Mary

By: Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel J. Pritchett — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:07:42 +0000

Once you get your WP blog running and your posts imported there are a few other important things to do.

4) Modify your feedburner feed to point to your new blog. If your site is anything like mine then most of your readers are coming in via RSS and not going straight to the blog anyway. Install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin and it will walk you through the process.

5) We need to figure out a way to preserve some of the search engine mojo your existing blog has already built up. It will be somewhat difficult because your current links all end in .blogspot.com and any new WP blog you set up won't be on Blogspot. Worst case we can put something in your blogspot template that redirects everything to your WordPress front page. Something like this might be painful but I agree with here:

Get your own unique URL. It matters in the long run, especially should you choose to change hosts. For instance, if you move off a blogger account at *.blogspot.com , you lose all link equity and page rank for that domain. This means you’d have to start again from scratch. Already in that position? Make the switch now.

By: Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel J. Pritchett — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:50:28 +0000

I'd be happy to help, Mary. There are a few major points to focus on, the rest can fall into place after the move as you have time.

1) Choose a web host that automatically installs WordPress for you and install it to the root directory of your web space. I chose tubu.net and while I had some initial headaches it's working pretty well now and it's hard to beat the $10/year price ($9 with a discount code).

2) Import your posts from Blogger to Wordpress. There's a feature in the WP control panel under Manage->Import that is supposed to slurp up all of your Blogger content automatically. That didn't work for me so I used a slightly more complicated method outlined by Brad Linder:

If your new site is hosted by GoDaddy or another web host that blocks imports from Blogger, just go to Wordpress.com and create a new, free blog that's hosted by Wordpress. You should be able to import your posts this way, and then go to Manage -> Export in the control panel to save your blog as an XML file on your desktop. You should be able to import this file into your new hosted blog without any problems.

3) Pick a WordPress theme other than the default Kubrick theme. You can find plenty at the Wordpress site. Installing this will require some basic knowledge of FTP. If that's a problem let me know and I will do it.

Good luck!