My Experience Moving to WordPress

I had been thinking about moving to WordPress for nearly a year. I finally made the jump due to Blogger’s inability to email me about comments. This was the nudge that I needed to make the move.

Last year I participated in the 2017 New Quilt Bloggers. It was an eye-opening experience for many reasons, but what became clear was there were many reasons that WordPress was the way to go.  Some of them included:
1.  Loading photos was so slow,
2.  Options for adding in functionality was difficult,
3.  I could choose a domain name (kathleenmcmusing),
4.  Blogger didn’t play nice with my iPad for editing/creating content.
5.   And finally, comments weren’t working.

I knew that one of the bloggers last year, Jan at Cocoa Quilts, moved to WordPress. She used a service called Pipdig. I asked her a few months ago if she liked the service and she said yes.  I read the recommendations on their site and also started looking around.  Here are the things you need to decide:

1.   Will you use wordpress.org or wordpress.com.  Pipdig also has some information on this.
-Wordpress.com is a free site, but you may run into problems with space.
-Self hosted gives you a domain name and more control
2.  Who will host your site?   A year ago, Bluehost was recommended but in the past year it seemed Siteground was being recommended by more folks – due to some issues that bluehost had last year. My husband has had many years in the technology business and he agreed as did Pipdig.

Things to do before moving:

1.  Familiarize yourself with WordPress.  I began a blog on wordpress.com (free site) and played.  Pipdig has a tutorial when you purchase.  There are others out there. Learn it!
2.  Think about organizing pictures  – this I didn’t do and it may have been good to download all the pictures
3.  Back up your site
4.  For free WordPress and self-hosted WordPress -purchase migration package ($97 one time cost).  You may also want to purchase a theme (how your blog will look).
5.  Self-hosted WordPress has two other things to do

a.  purchase domain name ($27.95 was my cost for the year – domain name/protection)
b.  purchase hosting  service ($91.20 for the year – recurring cost)

The actual move:

So this was pretty easy.  Phil at Pipdig did all the work. He is in England, so a bit of a time lag, but very prompt responses and really so helpful.  My blog stayed up the whole time.  My old blog is redirected and my old links go to my new site.  SO, if you had a link to my tutorial, it should still work.  While there were some fiddly things there was very little that needed fixing.  I wanted all my pictures accessible (this may come to haunt me-storage costs) so it would be easy to reuse some (I often do).

SO should you do it?  Do you like learning new things?  Are you frustrated by what you are using to blog?  Check out WordPress.org and play.  It can’t hurt.  I recommend the people I used 100%.  I have not needed help from my host, but I believe it is easy to get.  I do feel like my site looks better and it works better for me.

I am happy to answer any questions you have on this.

 

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