Possible Move From Blogger to Wordpress, advice please.

[Avada14]

Hello,

I have a blog which is a few months old and getting 3-5k page views a day (8-10 weekends) it is monetized with adsense and CPA ads. It's on blogger so is free although, I have bought my own domain name. I read that wordpress host your content therefore you pay for hosting, or you have to have hosting perhaps? Either way you pay...

I don't mind paying as it's probably less than 10 dollars per month. I'm just curious about the main pro's to using wordpress vs blogger if any. I am doing ok right now so don't want to move if I will have little or no benefits. I hear a lot about wordpress plugins and they sound great, but I just don't know if I need them.

I have on my blog, around 15 pages, which are mainly video content and a small paragraph and titles about each video. The home page has a videos, images and 270 words. So it is really not about content with words, more images and videos. Any advise would be great, Thanks.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

There are no cons, Wordpress is great and you own it, unlike Blogger where Google owns your ass. Moving to your own hosted WP is a great move IMO.

Only thing to watch out for is not install untrusted themes(some have exploits and malware) and always update WP to keep security holes closed. Run periodic backups and that's the only extra hassle about running your own thing. Other than that, it's all pluses, you can publish whatever you want, customize it however you want and even sell it for a higher price than a blogger blog.

 

[bullsbears]

With that many pages i think you should just backup your blog regularly and continue to use blogger platform. I don't see any big advantage switching.

 

[Avada14]

Thanks, I think the main benefit as above is owning it yourself. That is a big plus. However it would be a lot of work moving everything across but would be worth while in the end. I presume I could transfer my domain name if I were to move. I would probably have to transfer over a few days. I am still thinking about it in the long-term.

With blogger they allow video clips upto 100MB. Does anyone know what wordpress allow, or would this be down to your domain host i.e godaddy etc?

 

[bartosimpsonio]

If you host your own installation you can set the file limits yourself. I think the default PHP limit is 10MB files, but you can open php.ini and set that to 2 terabytes if you want. I don't think Wordpress limits file sizes but PHP does.

 

[Avada14]

Damn that PHP, PHP goes way over my head but thanks, I can always research how to do that nearer the time.

 

[kindarthur]

+ 1 for wordpress. I think you will be happy with wordpress. WordPress is easy to use and time spent on formatting will be greatly reduced. You can set up multiple users for your site. Just my two cents about wordpress.

 

[Avada14]

Yes overall it sounds better from what I'm hearing; I like the idea of plugins and owning your content. I am a little nervous about the practicalities in terms of moving.

Has anyone else actually done this? I can imagine I would practically rebuild my site word for word image for image etc. I would love to keep my template so I presume I just go to HTML and copy the entire code?

 

[imsolulu]

Yes overall it sounds better from what I'm hearing; I like the idea of plugins and owning your content. I am a little nervous about the practicalities in terms of moving.

Has anyone else actually done this? I can imagine I would practically rebuild my site word for word image for image etc. I would love to keep my template so I presume I just go to HTML and copy the entire code?

Oh no ! you won't be able to keep a template this way, building a template on wordpress require some php knowledge. If you want to keep the same template I guess that you'll have to hire a guy to do it for you. There are plenty of great wordpress themes you can use and they look just fine.

Have a look at this plugin : wordpress. org /plugins/blogger-importer/
You will be able to import all of your posts/images with a single click.

Hope I saved you a day of labor lol.

 

[TheGreyMatter]

That's a great idea. And I agree with the most people above, if you're on WP, you own everything and you don't need to worry about that your blog might get deleted or removed anytime by Google. It's also allows a lot more customization than Blogger and hence opens a lot more opportunities for doing black hat stuff in case if you ever plan to try that.

 

[Avada14]

Oh no ! you won't be able to keep a template this way, building a template on wordpress require some php knowledge. If you want to keep the same template I guess that you'll have to hire a guy to do it for you. There are plenty of great wordpress themes you can use and they look just fine.

Have a look at this plugin : wordpress. org /plugins/blogger-importer/
You will be able to import all of your posts/images with a single click.

Hope I saved you a day of labor lol.

That's a great idea. And I agree with the most people above, if you're on WP, you own everything and you don't need to worry about that your blog might get deleted or removed anytime by Google. It's also allows a lot more customization than Blogger and hence opens a lot more opportunities for doing black hat stuff in case if you ever plan to try that.

Thanks guys,

Yeah when I get this move on the road you've saved me time! I have heard good things about bluehost for my hosting so may look at them. It's good to know that the transfer is made easier with that plugin, I presume I can add each pages' contents one by one this way too?

 

[SEOnetic]

you don't need to switch.Blogger is a great place.

 

[shabbir76]

Yes wordpress is more convienent than blogger, all the blog has google maintenance, as far as quality is and plugins wordpress has got good one and all the stuff, blogger restricts your data to 2 GB as far as I think so move on

 

[Avada14]

Yes wordpress is more convienent than blogger, all the blog has google maintenance, as far as quality is and plugins wordpress has got good one and all the stuff, blogger restricts your data to 2 GB as far as I think so move on

Cheers, I lastnight signed up to dreamhost and got a FREE domain name so that's a plus. I also downloaded the wordpress installation and filezilla. Tonight I will watch some YT instructionals on how to get set up.

It seems very hard to be honest but I suppose it's going to be, as it's all new to me. Did you find it easy to set up everything?

Its only been 10 hours but my dreamhost account is still pending, I believe shortly once active I should be to attain my details that I need to input into filezilla?

 

[RankSnatcher]

My vote goes to WP as well like most here.

From the time I moved to WP from blogger, I had no look back..

Its all about owning the thing. WP feels like owning, where I never felt like owning with blogger.

 

[linnet]

Right Said , WP is just too strong an way ahead of a Blogger site.
You can just do anything and everything, any pro blogger would use WP as their platform. Just you need to take care of few things like bartosimpsonio said and you will see the Advantages.

There are no cons, Wordpress is great and you own it, unlike Blogger where Google owns your ass. Moving to your own hosted WP is a great move IMO.

Only thing to watch out for is not install untrusted themes(some have exploits and malware) and always update WP to keep security holes closed. Run periodic backups and that's the only extra hassle about running your own thing. Other than that, it's all pluses, you can publish whatever you want, customize it however you want and even sell it for a higher price than a blogger blog.

 

[badger2]

Wordpress is better but I think blogger might get ranked better on google.

 

[xxf8xx]

I would definitely move to wordpress. It's a pretty simple move really. You can get plugins to import your entire blog. Then all you have to do is 301 redirect your blogger to your wordpress site. That means if anyone tries to go to the blogger site they will instantly be redirected to the wordpress site instead. There's a plugin for wordpress called blogger 301 redirect or something that generates the code for you.

Cheers and good luck!

 

[Avada14]

Hey thanks,

I am debating whether to set up the WP blog by importing all the content but set it up under my new domain name instead. I can then just put my new domain address in my YT video descriptions to get traffic going etc.

 

[antha1]

Hey thanks,

I am debating whether to set up the WP blog by importing all the content but set it up under my new domain name instead. I can then just put my new domain address in my YT video descriptions to get traffic going etc.

You will have to regain all traffic. Domain names are valuable and it appears as if you are ranking them already. My suggestion will be to continue with the current domain.
You can always use the new domain for something else.

You would also want to give attention to the URLs. When you do a simple import from blogger to wordpress:
1. You will find that the naming conventions are different and your pages are now having a different URL
2. Your posts (if there are any) URLs are different
3. Categories are displayed differently

The way I have dealt with them is to let Wordpress posts/pages with the nomenclature that I find easy to remember. Next, I create a page/post with original address as it was in blogger. Create a 301 redirect from this page to the Wordpress original page (free plugins available on wordpress[dot]org/plugins.
In future you can use the "Wordpress way to create posts/pages".