For years, I’ve toyed with the idea of migrating from Blogger to WordPress. I even tried a few demo sites on WordPress.com. But I always came back to Blogger. It is easy, simple, familiar, safe and… free! But… it’s also limiting. There is only so much you can do with Blogger.
In January, I decided that 2021 was going to be the year that I would make the shift to WordPress.org (also known as the “real” WordPress). At a very basic level, I had the idea of signing up with Patreon and adding that to my blog. I also wanted to be able to merge the website (josefjakobs.com) and the blog (josefjakobs.info) into one site. But how to go about it?
I read a tonne of articles about migrating from Blogger to WordPress. It sounded easy in theory but I am by no means a web tech savvy person. And then I came across the WPBeginner site which offered to do the transfer for Free(!) as long as I signed up for web hosting with one of five companies, from which the WPBeginner folks would get a commission. These were all big name hosting companies so it sounded legit. I found some glowing reviews about the transfer process by people who had used the WPBeginner service and decided to bite the bullet.
The Pros
I used the WPBeginner link to sign up with a hosting service and… the ball was set into motion. All I had to do was give the WPBeginner folks admin access to the blog and choose a theme but… after that… I just sat back while they did all the hard work.
Because I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years, there were almost 500 posts to be migrated, which took a fair bit of time. Once the migration was complete, they invited me to have a look at the new site and see if there were any hiccups.
There were several issues – only 10% of the the blog comments had made the migration. The links on the pages were pointing to the Blogger post editor and some photos on the pages had gone MIA. As well, all of the Blogger labels had been imported as Categories rather than Tags. The WPBeginner folks handled all of that, although it required a more technologically complex operation. But… it got handled. It did take some time though since we seemed to be operating in completely opposite time zones!
Once all the kinks were worked out, it was a simple matter of pointing the nameservers on my domain site to the hosting site. That was a 5 minute job and then we had to wait 48 hours for that to propagate around the web. During that period, the blog looked seriously weird but… after 48 hours, the WPBeginner folks switched the WordPress site from Draft to Live and… we were good to go!
They also installed several plugins for me which was helpful!
The Cons
So… that write-up makes this sound like it was a relatively painless experience. It was not! It was absolutely terrifying. Figuring out WordPress is a huge (like HUGE!) learning curve. It all sounds so simple… so easy… but it’s not!
Let’s look at “Pick a Theme”. I did a tonne of research debating about whether to go with a free theme or a paid theme. I eventually chose Astra Pro and have second-guessed myself ever since. Do I like the look of it? It isn’t what I expected. Should I have told the WPBeginner folks to use one of the Starter Templates? Maybe I need a Page Builder like Elementor? Do I need to upgrade to Elementor Pro? What is the best Security plugin? Do I need a paid version or is free good enough? What about a Cache plugin? And an SSL plugin? Oh and something to back up the site. And an anti-spam plugin. Anything else? Oh yes, I need a plugin to make a Contact Form and a subscription form and… well, you get the picture.
Unlike Blogger where Google handles all of that stuff… with WordPress, I’m in charge which means I’m responsible for all of these features and issues. Read enough articles about websites being hacked and… you get really conscientious about choosing a good security plugin. But researching all of these plugins and options required a ridiculous amount of time.
On top of all that… there were some hiccups with the Blogger transfer, mostly due to how Blogger codes things in html. Here are a few examples:
- Images – In Blogger images are coded as tables. When a blog post gets imported into WordPress, it arrives in the Classic editor as a table. But WP has migrated to Gutenberg Blocks which are more powerful than the Classic editor. While the ALT info was still attached to the images (good), the image caption was a separate row in the table (bad). When I went to Convert the blog post to Gutenberg Blocks… the image and caption were transformed into a table with the image and caption in separate rows AND the ALT information got lost because the image had been converted into a Table block, not an Image block. This is not helpful. Sooo now, before I convert to Blocks, I need to go through each blog post, copy the caption and attach it to the image. Any hyperlinks in the captions do not get copied, so they need to be added manually. After all the images and captions are reconnected… then I can convert to Blocks.
- Blocks – Converting from Classic to Blocks leaves a bunch of random html blocks cluttering up the post. Some have <div> style coding while others are empty. This is, again, an artifact of Blogger coding, but they all need to be cleaned up.
- Headings – What was a Heading in Blogger is not always converted into a Heading in WP Blocks. Sometimes they are converted to Headings, but most often, they are converted to a Paragraph block. And these all need to be manually converted to Heading blocks. But… they still didn’t look right. I had a look at the html coding for the headings and it turns out that there are extra coding bits from Blogger (font size large and bold) which are mucking up the theme’s default style for Headings. So all of those coding bits need to be manually deleted in the coding editor.
- Lists – While I like Gutenberg blocks, there are some things where it doesn’t format well – like the List block (either numbered or bulleted) and indenting a paragraph. The lists aren’t indented enough… so the current workaround is to insert a Classic block and put lists in there. It’s the same with quotes. I don’t want a fancy quote (in big text) or a pull quote… I just want to be able to indent a quote… which needs a Classic block.
- SEO – In Blogger, with a custom domain (josefjakobs.info), there was a Search Description field where I could enter a short description of the blog post. This did not transfer into WordPress and, now that Blogger no longer has a custom domain, that feature no longer exists. Which doesn’t seem like big deal until you have Yoast (SEO) installed. Yoast wants me to add a keyphrase and a meta description for each and every blog post so that Search Engines can find and categorize my blog… and it ends up higher in the search rankings on Google. Right then… so I’m having to go through each blog post (all 470+ of them) and manually add these bits of meta info. Charming.
- Scrivener – Back in the summer, I had experimented with drafting blog posts in Scrivener (the Arthur Albert Tester series). I would then copy the text from Scrivener and paste it into Blogger. It looked fine in Blogger but… once they got transferred to WP, the formatting looked seriously wonky. And, when I went to convert the posts to Block format… OMG… it all came in as HTML blocks! At first I thought that all the posts before August 2020 would be like this (around the same time I changed to a responsive theme in Blogger) but… no… it seems like it was just the posts drafted in Scrivener. A headache, but not insurmountable.
During the last four weeks (I started the process on February 4) I have vacillated between wanting to stop the whole process and go back to Blogger. You’ve heard of learning zones, growth zones and stretch zones? Yeah, well… this was a serious stretch zone for me! If I had known, on February 3, what all of this would entail, I’m not sure that I would have gone through with it. Oh sure, I could hire a web designer or some WP guru to help but… that’s mega bucks.
The Cost
Speaking of which… all of this costs money!
- Domain – well, I already had that – $80/year
- Hosting – $100/year
- AstraPro – $60/year
And then there are the Premium options for some of the “Free” plugins:
- Security – $90 to $200/year
- Anti-spam – $30/year
- Elementor Pro – $60/year
- OptInMonster (for subscriptions, etc) – $120/year
- ConstantContact (manage email lists) – $20/month
- JetPack Pro – $72/year
- Yoast Pro – $90/year
I’m going to muddle through with the free options for now and see how things go. All of it sounds so cheap when you first look at moving to WordPress – Hosting “Only” $3/month!! (for the first year…)… Free Themes! (very limited options) and on it goes…
Having been through the entire process… I think I’m glad that I made the move… I think… maybe. Time will tell. And no, I haven’t deleted the old Blogger posts. Fingers crossed I’ll never need them but they can just sit there for a while.
In the meantime, I am going to spend an hour a day chipping away at the old posts: fixing the formatting issues, adding the SEO meta info and tidying things up. At that rate, I’ll be done in… eight weeks. Sigh.