I’m a wordpress.com blogger. WordPress.com is awesome for a new bloggers. It’s easy to use, looks good, gives you lot’s of detail about what’s going on with your blog and has an enormous, engaged user community which means no matter what you’re trying to do, a simple Google search will give you an answer. WordPress.com has been good to me but I think I’m up for a change.
Over the coming weeks I’m going to be blogging about… blogging. Specifically about my journey moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org (or self hosted WordPress). I’m going to have some help along the way from the lovely people over at Little Hero Hosting who will be helping me out with the move. This posting series is in someways sponsored because they’re providing me a lot of the transfer support in return for me documenting the journey.
Why I’m ready to move to from a wordpress.com site to a self hosted wordpress.org site
One of my goals was to make some income from writing. Nothing too flash, just enough to keep petrol in the Aston Martin. My plan was to write good posts regularly that would build a group of engaged readers and then write a small amount of paid content that I could use to generate some cash. Since I made that decision I’ve managed to get into a rhythm with my posts , building a small group of people that regularly check out my writing.
What I need now is the flexibility to tweak my site’s appearance, host some advertising (which wordpress.com doesn’t like you doing) and (try) to optimise my sites SEO and Google search rankings. I also like the idea of truly owning my blog.
What about people on blogspot.com – should they be looking at WordPress.org?
There seems to be a lot of people offering to help others switch their blogspot.com site to a self hosted wordpress.org site. I’ve not used a blogspot.com site so I can’t comment on what you can and can’t do with it but some quick Google research highlights some of the common reasons that people are switching;
- Google owns your blog. There are rumours about Google black listing people for no particular reason which means you can’t access your blog. Has this happened to you?
- Blogger sites are not always taken seriously – Again I have no idea if this is true. Blogger seems to have the ability to support a proper URL and I take plenty of blogspot.com sites seriously. Have you experienced anything like this?
- WordPress.org allows more attractive, functional websites. This is probably down to personal preference and if your blogspot sites suits what you are after visuall – great. I can only speak from my experience that WordPress does do some very nice looking websites
- Stats require Google analytics and scripting. I have no idea if this is true. Funnily enough one of the reasons I want to move to WordPress.org is to get access to google analytics for my site
- Blogger has limited SEO flexibility.
It’s nice to have some help along the way
As I mentioned earlier. I’m lucky enough to have the Australian based Little Hero Hosting & Little Hero Designs helping me along as I grow up my site. They specialise in helping people move from Blogspot.com or wordpress.com to a self hosted WordPress.org website. Before talking to Little Hero I was intending to do the work myself but after a couple of hours of confusion I thought enlisting the help of someone that knew what they were doing made more sense. Over the coming weeks I’ll explain how businesses like Little Hero Hosting can make changing blogs easier and safer.
So are you considering moving? Is there anything you would like to know? Have you moved already? If so, how was it?
Like what your reading? Can’t risk missing another post? Want to see how this crazy adventure turns out? Then why not keep up on all thing Illiterate via the facebook page, twitter or bloglovin?
Sharing my Tuesday with Jess over at EssentiallyJess.com for I Blog on Tuesday
