It took me forever to make up my powerful mind, but this year I completed the move of my oldest blogging endeavors to their own domains on self-hosted platforms.
That also meant making the change from Blogger to WordPress.
The technical part went flawlessly, largely in part to the fact that WordPress is now about as user friendly as one could want. The very large “Ilona’s Garden Journal” with more than a thousand posts was imported to Home Garden Companion without a hitch. I think there were a few images to import manually, but all else went splendidly.
I wrote a bit more about it, wherein I tell you about the part I did have trouble in: transferring traffic from my longstanding blog to the new.
Relocating from Blogger and Setting Up With WordPress
The New Blog
The new blog is working very well at its new home, although it has not regained its pagerank (probably due to my many mistakes). I learned, late, that it was important to do 301 directs from the old location. I tried several other methods which were probably somewhat damaging.
It required setting up a landing page in wordpress to help visitors find the right page they were looking for at the old location, which took me some time to find information on and follow. So the entire process did not go smoothly, no… Only the import of the actual posts.
Visit and see the new look and digs:
The New Ilona’s Garden Journal
What Has Changed
Besides the whole format, the theme is very different. As of now I use the default theme with those blogs which I moved from Blogger. I also combined the Old House site with Ilona’s Garden Journal, putting it in a subdirectory.
The two types of themes I use are DIVI from Elegant themes, and the Twenty Fifteen from WordPress default suite of themes.
My main necessity at this point is to write more, and feel that the changeover from Blogger to wordpress will help me accomplish it.
In a future post I’ll try to document some of the tech troubleshooting solutions I described here.
