Moving house is a lot of work
I have shifted home this month! It is not a physical house, but to redirect my domain name from blogger to wordpress. And it takes a lot of work to do it on my own. First, I need to purchase my hosting service, second to download wordpress and third to work on the template from scratch. You may not see a lot of physical changes from the old blogger website that I used to have but to me now, everything works like a charm. This is money well spent! Here are the reasons why I think moving on to wordpress makes more sense.
1 – Blogger gives me headache
Literally. Yes. Everytime I log onto blogger dashboard to add something new, some other gadget will stop working without giving me any notice. I don’t understand why it is happening, but I reason that many of these gadgets are working on third party javascripts – the scripts may just be missing or corrupted or just incompatible with something new I have installed. The breaking point came when the related posts gadget stopped functioning suddenly. It makes me real mad, because I have spent so much time customising it.
2 – Blogger is an underdeveloped world
Even though Blogger is bought over by Google, and Google is obviously still doing well, it’s baby (Blogger) is simply left to decay on its own. There are hardly any new gadgets being written for it and even those gadgets on their dashboard are not working anymore. When you do a google search to troubleshoot what is happening, much of the advice dates back to the 2010s. Despite how hard you try, you cannot revive any part of it. It is no wonder that many of the blogger folks out there have also given up on Blogger. It’s free, but hey, we spent a lot of time and sweat on the site to make it look the way it is. How can Google do this to us?
3 – WordPress has many nicer templates
You will know it when you log onto the wordpress dashboard. I can’t believe the sheer number of choices I have that I have a tough time deciding which template I want. When I was using blogger, I had nothing to choose so I ended up with the most simple layout which everyone else is using. Everything flows well in wordpress – the fonts are unified and that makes reading so much easier. You can’t imagine reading a newspaper with 10 different font types on one single page, do you? That is what is happening on Blogger; most of the gadgets are written by different people and the scripts are on third party websites, there is little way of configuring it to have the same feel unless you know CSS very well and can override these chosen fonts.
4. – Why not the free wordpress?
I read that it has limited capabilities. I don’t know how that works. But I have used wordpress.org many years back and I like the fact that there are many downloadable plugins. The other reason is the free wordpress refuse to let your existing domain name point to their free wordpress platform unless you pay them a re-direction fee. It doesn’t sound right to me. I am already paying my own domain, and now you are telling me I need to pay another fee for re-direction and at the same time, not the real owner of my own home. Since you do not own the free wordpress, you may run the risk of them shutting down your site. Blogger has the same problem but they allow you to redirect your domain from BlogSpot A to BlogSpot B anytime you wish. And there is no redirection fee involved.
5. WordPress is multi-potent stem cell
WordPress is like a baby – there is more potential with it. You can add on new things just by installing new plugins (aka gadgets in blogger). The people who are working on these plugins are still pretty much alive and passionate about their work. And there are more options to make wordpress Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly, whereas there are limited options on blogger.
I have not shifted the rest of my posts over – I will do it slowly. This month has been a tiring month for me – there are too many things to do and yet too little time. The shift to wordpress has not an easy task – there are many small details to look into.
I hope that I can update more towards the middle of June!
Image: Pixabay