Richard asks – “I have a website and blog which is well established, many inbound links and high traffic. But the blogging software I can use is limited. It is difficult to customize and the categories are too big and slow to load.
Is it better to keep going with an imperfect blog software and lots of links or start afresh with the best blogging software?
I think there will be much better qualified people to answer this question than me Richard so I’ll invite readers to have their say.
My own experience of this is limited but I’ve seen many bloggers change blog platforms with varying degrees of success – quite often being able to keep the URLs of their blog the same despite swapping platforms. Of course this is much more difficult to do if you are using a hosted blog platform (like blogspot or typepad) where you’re not on your own domain – but in the long run it can be worthwhile making the move despite loosing some links and needing to start again with search engines.
But like I say – this is a question that exceeds my own personal expertise – so lets open it up to those who’ve been through this before.
- What are the pros and cons of moving from one blog platform to another?
- Have you done it? What did you learn along the way?
I wanted to set up in WP but realized on WP.com I couldn’t monetize and I wasn’t quite ready to figure out the WP software and wanted to experiment with blogging to figure out exactly what I want to do to. One thing, as one of the other commentators has noted that I REALLY want to add pages to my blog and blogger doesn’t seem to have that capability. Are most people who use wordpress using the software and not the wp.com site?
Terry, I don’t know for sure about the others here but I mean WordPress the software – the blogging platform, not the hosting service.
I recently switched all of my sites from Movable Type to WordPress and almost immediately saw difference not only in pagerank but in SEO and search engine traffic.
WordPress is much friendlier and the plugins that are out there just make it a fantastic tool to use for a blogger.
Although, MT4 is in beta and is supposed to be pretty phenomenal AND open source. I don’t think I’d ever go away from WordPress though. I’m kicking myself for not switching earlier.
I started on Blogger and then converted to WordPress on my own domain. I have a background in programming/web design so the conversion was pretty painless for me although the WP documentation is pretty straightforward. I agree with most of the others that if you are serious about blogging you will want to transition to serious software on your own domain.
As mentioned before you can use redirects to avoid URI change problems. Assuming you have a good stats program you should be able to identify which posts are even bringing you traffic. That may help you decide how much traffic is at risk.
My original reply was post #33.
Update: I spent about 5 hours last night tweaking a great WP theme from the people over at DoshDosh that is optimized for SEO and adsense and then proceeded to import the 11,005 total posts from my blogger account to WP. It didn’t take nearly as long as I had thought, I updated my RSS info at Feedburner and everything appears to be working without a hitch thus far.
I have left all the original blogger post articles on my server and probably will for sometime now, only changing the index.htm page (WP uses index.php). The change shouldn’t matter much because I have a custom 404 error page installed as well.
WP 2.2 imported all the Blogger lables I was using and everything. There is one small glitch in the system, so if you are on Blogger and looking to make the jump, you need to read this.
The WP import function will not work if you have your own domain name and are on your own FTP server. You need to login to Blogger, change the settings to point to a blogspot.com address (make one up), then save. Now you can import your posts.
I’m not looking back, only forward at this point.
There’s many ways of not losing a single links when you are in blogger or others and you move to WordPress. Many companies like ours can easily do it. You may see what we did with Enrique Dans (Spanish blogger)
(edans.blogspot.com to enriquedans.com)
I moved from WordPress to Blogger (on my own domain) and it was an upgrade.
I am still waiting for my new pagrank.
ExpertQTP
http://quicktesthp.blogspot.com
Thanks for sharing…. I have never tried wordpress.. I kicked started with blogger