There seems to be something in the water lately. The Google Blogger water. Just this weekend I’ve been contacted by several bloggers inquiring about moving to WordPress.
I am really really happy about that! Kind of.
What I am NOT happy about is why they’re moving.
A few days ago, the lovely Travel Babbles had no choice but to make an emergency transfer to WordPress. Why? Good old Google/Blogger was redirecting her blog to a random, plain site. When I tried reading her blog, no sooner had I clicked on a post than I was on that weird website. This is what Kym learned after calling her Domain Registrar (the people you pay the $10/year for your nice .com name)
That story sounds ALL too familiar.
Remember my post about How to Back up Your Blogger Posts? That was in May of last year. Blogger decided that my medical spa website design site was spam, flagged it as so, and therefore scraped it off the interwebs. Night. Mare. Thankfully this was just a design site and all of my content wasn’t on there. Within a month, I came over to WordPress.
My headache didn’t end there. See, since day one of blogging, I’ve always ran my site on a shoestring budget. At first it was a hobby, so it didn’t make sense spending all of this money on a hobby. But as time went on and I found out how to monetize my site, I didn’t want to lose all that work. I tried to transfer myself, but I had no idea what I was doing and I gave up. So I hired the least expensive bid I could find to transfer me. Big. Mistake.
The most important thing to me was not the blog design. As a designer I could figure something out if transferring my old design was too hard. All I really cared about was retaining all of my Pinterest traffic. Even though I didn’t know a DNS Registrar from a web-host at the time, I knew that I had valuable content on Pinterest under two different domains: my old .blogspot.com subdomain and my current .com domain. All of those pins needed to find their way to my new site if I was going to continue monetizing my site.
Guess what happened? A good portion didn’t find their way to my site and I had thousands of lost pageviews and lost income. I had to learn on my own how to fix this. It’s taken me several months (literally, over 6 months of constant research and networking) to fix that.
Now, the process ISN’T REALLY AS SCARY AS YOU MAY THINK if you hire the right person. I’ve heard so many horror stories and people stating they want to move back to Blogger because blah blah blah that I knew I had to do something. So I started offering Blogger to WordPress migrations of my own. I didn’t want anyone to have my experience.
Last night I transferred Glam Hungry Mom to WordPress and it was a smooth transition. Andrea is a very DIY kind of person (much like I am) and attempted to do this on her own. By the time I spoke to her, she had already purchased web-hosting, and she also purchased the Genesis framework (a must IMHO). But she got stuck (and I don’t blame her) somewhere in the process and needed help.
It was at this point that I thought to myself, “Self, why don’t you offer a DIY transfer package?” The upfront costs of moving to WordPress can add up, and as a fellow blogger, I empathize. So the following was born.
Afraid of leaving your blog in the hands of Google?
Put your blog in my hands by placing your order on my design site, Mila Design Co.