Moving Your Blog to WordPress

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Grant Landram

If you’re a blogger using a platform like WordPress.com, Blogspot (Blogger), Tumblr, Typepad or another online solution, you may have heard people talking about “WordPress” and how they’re doing all sorts of fancy things like customizing their design, adding pop-up email opt-ins, or embedding advertisements or other revenue generators. Have you ever wondered how you could do those same things with your blog? Wondering what “WordPress” even is?

Well we’re here to help! I’m giving a talk at the Minnesota Blogger Conference on Moving Your Blog to WordPress, and the different considerations involved in doing so. Below you’ll find the major talking points, as well as the slides and resources you’ll need to learn and do it yourself.

Download the Slides

I’ll post the video and photos from the conference once it’s processed so you can follow along. Cheers!

Moving Your Blog to WordPress

1. What is WordPress?

WordPress is best explained using the metaphor of The Hotel & The House.

The Hotel (WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr, etc)

Often referred to as “a hosted solution”, you can use WordPress.com to get blogging instantly. There’s no technical knowledge or setup required, you just tell them to give you a blog, and it works, similar to going and getting a hotel room. In a hotel the elevators, sinks, toilets, etc all simply work, no setup required. If there’s a problem, you call the front desk and they fix it. Similarly, on WordPress.com, or any of the other popular hosted platforms, everything is taken care of for you, allowing you to just signup and get started.

WordPress.com is amazingly easy to use and maintain, but lacks customizability and originality. Imagine calling the front desk at a hotel and telling them you want to re-paint the walls in your room.

The House (WordPress)

Often referred to as a “self-hosted solution” WordPress lets you setup your own blog/site using their awesome framework. Similar to building your own house, WordPress let’s you download the awesome blueprint from the WordPress.com “Hotel”, and use it to build your own house, on your own property. You get to choose the appliances, the paint color, even the roof… but you’re also ultimately responsible for all maintenance and setup.

WordPress is great if you want to set up an original blog or website, but it does require attention and upkeep.

2. Why switch to WordPress?

• Customizable: Simliar to building your own house, you get to make it your own. With ~17,000 plugins and an uncountable amount of themes on the market, you can have an extremely customizable blog up and running in a few hours.
• Powerful: WordPress powers some of the most powerful sites in the World including sites for CNN, CBS, BBC and NASA. Want that kind of power underneath the hood of your blog?
• Community: With over 17% of the internet running on WordPress, and over 20,000 people making their living using WordPress professionally, chances are you’ll find peers, service providers, and resources for any problem you encounter while using WordPress.

3. How to switch to WordPress? (And not lose everything in the process)

It’s different depending on what platform you’re migrating from, but here are the general steps.

1. Purchase hosting and a domain
2. Install WordPress
3. Export your old blog’s content
4. Import that content into your new WordPress site
5. Customize to your hearts desire!

Here are some great resources for you to use to guide you through your migration process:

Blogger (Blogspot) -> WordPress
Tumblr -> WordPress
WordPress.com -> WordPress

Some Photos from the session thanks to conference attendees:

If you have photos from the session feel free to email them to us at support at freshmuse dot com.

• ← Why WordPress? [Infographic]
• Top 10 Reasons to Use WordPress for Business →