At the end of January, after many years of saying “no”, I finally made the switch from Blogger to a self hosted WordPress blog. I am so glad that I did!
In this post, I would like to share some of my results from my first two months with WordPress.
Comparison of traffic from February-March 2010 to February-March 2011:
In these time period I have seen a 52% increase in visits and a 53% increase in pageviews!
Top 5 posts from this time period:
1. The best advice for a happy marriage (734 views)
2. Are you an impatient person? ( (731 views)
3. 25 things I hate about facebook (623 views)
4. Our fears establish the limits of our life (457 views)
5. Finding emotional rest (310 views)
Traffic sources for this time period:
My biggest source of traffic has been from StumbleUpon (I am going to write on this some time soon) and then from referrals from my old blogger site.
I want to get my search engines traffic up. I know this will take time as my new wordpress blog gets indexed and crawled by Google.
I am already beginning to see increases. I went from 2% in February to 7% in March. I am currently at 10% in April so far.
If you are on Blogger I would highly encourage you to make the switch to a self-hosted WordPress blog. Here is the tutorial that I used to make the switch. It was very simple!
What blogging platform are you currently using?
***** UPDATE *****
After thinking about this some more I came to the conclusion that I didn’t paint the whole picture here. There were many many factors that contributed to my 50% increase in traffic from last year to this year. Switching to a self-hosted WordPress blog was just one of them (I may do another blog post on the rest of the factors that led to my increase in traffic at a later time).
To presents the facts a little more fairly I will share the comparison from December-January 2010 (the previous two months) to February-March 2011 (when I switched to WordPress).
Comparison of traffic from December-January 2010 to February-March 2011:
In this time period I have seen a 13% increase in visits and a 22% increase in pageviews! I still think that is pretty impressive!
Very cool, Kevin!
Thanks Jason!
I’m on blogger right now…but I won free hosting, a domain name, and standard theme last month (Thanks to Peter at http://PeterPollock.com Kathy at http://Katdish.net and John at http://Tentblogger.com)
I’m working on migrating everything over and designing the new wordpress blog. I’m also changing up the name and focus of my blog. I’m exicted about the changes and can’t wait to get it up and live!
Hey, did you lose all your comments when you moved over to wordpress? Were you using Intense debate on blogger?
Yes, I did.
I have tried everything and I can’t get them to migrate over. I think I changed the permalink structure on my wordpress blog too soon and it doesn’t jive with blogger’s permalink.
That’s awesome Ryan!
I look forward to seeing your “new” blog.
I’ve only used self-hosted WP…that’s not true I remember finding an old blog on blogger.com that I did for a while years ago.
Almost all my traffic comes from Search Engines, Twitter is the next source. I haven’t looked it up lately, have too much to think about to be absorbed in traffic right now.
BTW – It’s the quality of your posts that keep me coming back.
Thanks for your encouraging words Trevor!
I just remembered… WP 3.1 has a migration tool built in. Did you use it to transfer?
Yeah, I did. It worked fine for the posts and my original blogger comments but I can’t get my Intense Debate comments to migrate over.
Its a good move Kevin. I feel sorry to see the Chrome reporting malicious when you were hosting on blogger platform. Now you are much more free to optimize and make better use of facilities.
I am so glad that I finally made the move! It has been awesome so far!
You have done the right thing Kevin, as you have proved yourself.
It is much better to be in total control of your blog rather than being in the position when blogger or some other company can take it away from you any time.
Very true Trevor!
Thanks for sharing!
Cool man! Thanks for sharing!
I am a self hosted WordPress user and love it!
It is definitely great!
Thanks Adam!
Hi Kevin ~ I know you must be excited…those are impressive numbers increase…and just from switching to a self-hosted blog!! Hopefully it wasn’t too difficult to have made the switch (moved over items from your previous blog site)? Appreciate you sharing
Christine
Hi Christine:
The biggest issue that I ran into my migrating my comments. I am still trying to work that one out.
Thanks for sharing!
Kevin
Hi Kevin,
Glad it was worth your while to make the switch. It’s always such a hassle to update and change things around. I switched to WordPress after having a website that I built using my web host’s site builder. I get a lot more traffic now, but I did have my blog built for me. Thanks for sharing your results.
Wishing you a song in your heart,
Miss Leslie @ Music with Miss Leslie
Hi Leslie:
My next big step will be getting a premium theme. I am waiting on my first google adsense check to come in so that I can buy it.
Thanks for sharing!
Kevin
Cheapskate that I am, I only use the free stuff.
If you don’t mind my asking, what theme are you looking at getting?
I am looking at getting the Standard Theme. I have heard lots of good stuff about it.
Thank you for sharing. I need to go from Blogger to WordPress.
It is definitely worth making the switch Dan!
It does come with a cost but it is not that much. Check out the links that I shared in the post (the one about migrating from Blogger to WordPress by tentblogger and the link that I shared for a web hosting site).
This is what I tell a lot of my clients to do how have blogger blogs. But do they listen, few do. I think it is the complexity they are concerned about and possibly paying more to have someone do it for them. It really is easy once you get to know it. But they don’t even want to try.
Sadly I was one of those people for a long time Emily.
I am so glad that I made the switch now!
Hi Kevin,
I’m happy at the positive effects that switching from Blogger to WordPress had given you.
I’ve read all the top 5 posts you mentioned here.
Wish you all the best!
Thanks for sharing Johanna!
Hey Kevin
How was moving your past post from Blogger to WordPress? Was it pretty easy to do? Can you share with me how you did it?
This week I plan on switching and self hosting. This is one of the things I would want to do so new readers will see I’ve been blogging for a while.
Thank you
Dan
Hi Dan:
The move wasn’t too hard. Tentblogger’s tutorial is awesome. He is the WordPress master. He has been my biggest source of information (and then Peter Pollock).
Kevin
Thank you for letting me know. I will have to check out Tentblogger
First, your “backwards” logo pairing almost hurts to look at. I’m not exactly sure which is harder to look at for me, the WordPress W in the big orange block, or the Blogger B inside the blue circle.
ANYWAY… I digress…
I remember when I started blogging, it wasn’t even on Blogger. It was at Fortune City, if memory serves, but then they canceled their free service so I moved to Blogger and was there for quite some time. I remember I chose Blogger OVER WordPress to begin with because I was able to build a custom theme, and you couldn’t (and still can’t) do that with the free hosted WordPress.com sites. Ultimately, though, I was able to use WordPress in an environment where I was able to make my own template (or at least modify an existing one to better suit my personal tastes) and fell in love with it. I shortly thereafter moved all of my blogs from Blogger to WordPress. Thanks to the pages and categories, I was able to put 3 Blogger blogs into one WordPress blog.
LOL! I guess it can be difficult to look at.
Thanks for sharing!