Switching to Wordpress from Blogger
Max has been blogging on Blogger for just over a year and has some questions about switching over to a Wordpress BLog.
I’m seriously looking at wordpress as an alternative to blogger. Do you need your own domain? Does is cost? Is it as easy to set up as blogger? And would I be able to move all my old posts across from blogger? Sorry to be a pain. Cheers
- Domain name
I highly recommend buying domain names over at Name Cheap, I come across this site later rather than earlier in my on-line career and kicked myself for not finding them earlier. Their rates are among the best at $8 for a .com, their interface is the best by far and lastly, their renewal fees are the best. Before I come across Name Cheap, I was using another provider who offered .com domains at $15, but the renewal fee was $39! This was a pain as I had over 100 domains registered with them!
- Is Wordpress easy to set up?
If you are setting up wordpress for the first time, your bound to come across a few glitches and will be in need of some help. Don’t worry though, this will just require the patience and the willingness to go out there are learn. The great thing about Wordpress is the amount of resources out there offering help, I’m confident that what ever problem you face, a quick search on Google will find you the answer. If a search fails, you can always try the Wordpress forum, Youtube, and webmaster forums.
- Moving Blogger Blog posts to a Wordpress blog
Is very easy. After downloading Wordpress and uploading it to your server via FTP, log into the back-end and you’ll see a tab titled “Import”, this will automatically import your Blogger Blog posts and comments into wordpress.
The next step is to set up re-directs, which means when someone visits your blogger blog, they are automatically redirected to your new wordpress blog. A couple of other advantages for setting up re-directs include your link will be redirected as well, and you’ll also escape penalties from the search engines for having duplicate content (the same content on both blogs can get your blog banned from the search engines index). We would normally do this with a 301 redirect using a .htaccess file uploaded to the root directory of the old domain name via FTP. Unfortunately, this is not possible using Blogger. However, there are a few ways to get around this I can see from quick search on Google (I’ve never used Blogger), so check out these links out:
http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpress
http://laffers.net/howtos/howto-redirect-blogger-to-wordpress
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=moving+blogger+to+wordpress&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
Wow, thanks for that, that’s a great help. All I need now is to devote a quiet afternoon sometime and actually make the efort to do it. I’ve been using godaddy.com for domains but I’ll head over and give these guys that you’ve mentioned a try. Cheers!!
I’ve used godaddy before but didn’t like the amount of stuff they sty and sell you when buying a domain. You need to click “No Thanks” so many times before you can just do what you originally planned to do - buy a domain name!
Name Cheap offers the same pricing, but is a simple 2 step process (after you have an account) to buy a domain name! Plus, the back-end of Name Cheap is more clean and easy to navigate, due to not as many ads.
Anyway, check them out and let me know how you get on!
If you want to register a couple .com domain names, the cheapest I’ve found is the seemingly perpetual Maxim magazine promotion on netfirms at the following: http://netfirms.com/max (Currently it says offer ends Sept. 30/07, but I think the same offer seems to renew each month and has been ongoing for at least a couple years now).
Anyway Netfirms is terrible as a host but with the offer above you can register 2 .com domain names for $10usd. After I registered my domains there, I just pointed them to a different host. You should also be able to transfer the domain name registration to another registrar like Name Cheap when it’s time to renew.
Hi Mike,
With recent experience, many domain hosts have a transfer fee… You might want to check that out.
Chris