The Reason why I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress, and about Permalinks

I have been blogging in English since March of 2019 on Blogger which is a blogging platform provided by Google. I like Blogger as a platform because it is quick and smooth for writing, but I decided to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress and I am now almost finished moving it.

Today, I am going to write why I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress and what exactly I did to move it.

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Why did I choose Blogger at the beginning?

English is not my primary language, but I found that writing in English is fun and creative. Before I started writing in English I had blogged in Japanese for a few years on WordPress and other platforms. So, I could have started blogging in English with WordPress too, but I didn’t.

The reasons why I didn’t go with WordPress for my English blog were;

  • I was not really aiming to monetise my English blog
  • I really like writing on Blogger
  • The free themes on Blogger look sophisticated enough to me for writing in English
  • I don’t have to worry about the security on Blogger, at least less anxious than WordPress
  • and it’s easy to add Google ads on blogs on Blogger (if I want to earn on my blog).

I like writing on Blogger because it functions fast and it’s easy to use. It’s much quicker than writing on Tumblr or other platforms. Also, I have never experienced my blogs on Blogger get crushed or any kind of trouble for showing sites properly.

More importantly, it’s free to use with a unique domain, and there are (almost) no ads shown unless you insert your ads such as Adsense. It was perfect for me to build up my personal blog.

Blogging is not enough

As I said above, I have written online for years, as a freelance writer and a blogger. I love blogging, but my desire for writing has changed from year to year, and I found that there are some people writing other things online apart from blog posts, something a little more creative such as poetry, essays, or fiction stories.

As I read their creations more and more, my writing has also been shifting towards creative writing. I started writing poems and short stories as well as blog posts in my blog on Blogger. At the same time, I added Google ads on the blog to make a little profit through writing.

The more contents I posted, the more I got into writing in English. My blog became a mixture of creative writing and blogging.

The reason I decided to move it to WordPress

After I posted some of my poems, I realised that advertisements are not suitable for creative pieces. My Google ads were automatically shown since I set it up, and poetry is basically shorter than other posts.

Especially with the shortest poetry like Haiku, the advertisement looks awkward. It’s almost like a joke three or five lines of poems with ads on a page; it’s hard to say which is an ad and which is a poem. Ideally, I wanted to put my ads on my normal blog posts, and not to show ads on poetry or essay posts.

I could have separated my creative writing from my blog to keep two sites, but I didn’t want to manage too many blogs and websites anymore because I had already had a few Japanese blogs.

That’s why I decided to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress to customise it more flexibly. Fortunately, I already had a contract with a server for my Japanese blogs for building WordPress sites and I didn’t have to buy a new domain since I had it already with my Blogger’s blog.

To move my blog from Blogger to WordPress

Moving blogs or websites is not recommended. I had moved many of them before and I am fed up with doing it. Still, I wanted to move this blog again.

To move my blog from Blogger to WordPress, I used the plugin,
Blogger Importer Extended which makes it easier to move a blog from Blogger to WordPress.

I installed my favourite WordPress theme and plugins.

The URL of the top page used to be https://www.japanesque-cafe.com, but the new one is https://japanesque-cafe.com (without www.). My server automatically redirects between www.example.com and example.com. So, I didn’t have to worry about the URL of the top page.

Checking URL of each page is a tough job

The most time-consuming job was checking the URL of each post to make sure they all work. After moving the site, you want to keep the same URL because the posts were already indexed by the search engines with the URL on the original site.

On a WordPress blog, we can customise the permalink setting. I set up the permalink on my WordPress blog just the same as Blogger; example.com/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html, so that I could keep the exact same URL from Blogger to WordPress. However, I didn’t like this Blogger-like URL. I wanted to change the permalink too.

I don’t think it is necessary to show posting year and month on the URL. Some people say that it is better for SEO to show the categories on the URL, but I simply put a post name just after the domain (example.com) because I might change the categories in the future, and I don’t want the URL to change as I move the post from a category to another.

This is a tough part of moving the blog. When I decided to move it, it had already nearly 100 posts. I listed up the old URL of each post, and copy and pasted them on an excel sheet. After changing the permalink setting to example.com/%postname%/, installed the plugin called Redirection to redirect the old URL to the new URL in the blog. I set up redirects manually, but it seems that you can do this easily by uploading CSV files. My blog had less than 100 posts, so it didn’t take too long even doing it one by one.

Anyway, I almost finished what I needed to do with my blog-moving. Therefore, I should soon be able to focus on my writing from now on!

 

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