Do you really want to move from blogger to WordPress?

Now here’s a question I see people throwing around a lot in the blogosphere: Do I really want to move from blogger to WordPress? (Note, for the purposes of this post, when I say ‘Wordpress’, I mean the self-hosted version, not wordpress.com)

As with most things, there is a long and short answer to the above and today I am going to attempt to give a short answer. The VERY shortest answer is a question:

Do you want to own the content on your blog?

If the answer is yes then you need to have a self-hosted WordPress blog because with blogger, Google owns your content. If Google decides it doesn’t like something in your content then Google can and will press ‘delete’ and the first you will know about it is when your blog doesn’t exist anymore. Oh. My. Goodness.

Other reasons you might want to move to self-hosted wordpress:

1. You treat your blog like a business and generate income from it – whether this is through off-blog or on-blog methods
2. You want greater control over the look and feel and functionality of your blog
3. You want to be able to run competitions or promotions without worrying about whether you are breaking an obscure Google rule that no-one knows about
4. You want to be able to easily create static information pages (like about us and contact us) more easily

Reasons why you might want to stay with blogger

1. You don’t like change. I will be 100% honest and say that it takes a while to get your head around how WordPress does certain things. So if it took you a while to get your head around blogger, then you will get really annoyed having to re-learn how to do certain things in WordPress!
2. You don’t want to give up Google Friend Connect (Google stopped allowing WordPress blogs to display Friend Connect earlier this year)
3. It wouldn’t phase you a bit if you lost all your blog posts because of a glitch at the Google end.

Things you need to know if you do make the move

1. There is a bit to it. You CAN do it yourself (here’s a great guide that takes you through the process) but it is better to pay someone to do for you.
2. You may not able to get your sidebar to show things in exactly the same way in WordPress as it does in blogger.
3. If some posts have more than 50 comments, all the comments from that post may not come over.
4. If you have used two or more commenting systems over time (ie the blogger native commenting system and DISQUS) then you’ll have to choose whether you bring your DISQUS comments over or your blogger comments.
5. While all your old posts and most of your comments will get brought over to the WordPress site, all your photos will stay at blogger. They will appear in your WordPress posts, but they will be referenced from your blogger site. So you won’t be able to delete your blogger site.

So there you go – hopefully these give you some logical reasons for whether you should stay with blogger or not rather than wading into the emotional debate about which platform is better!

Have you made the move from blogger to WordPress?

How did you find it? Did I miss any important pros, cons or problems in the above?

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