Should You Switch to WordPress?

Last week, you may or may not have been surprised by my sudden switch from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress. I explained on Wednesday a little bit about it, especially how I won this transfer and may have not done it otherwise, but since this switch to WordPress affects more than just the appearance of Kate the (Almost) Great, I feel like it deserves more attention. Where you host your blog is a personal choice, but I thought I would add a little insight for the benefit of those thinking about it.

 

 

The biggest attraction of WordPress is that I’m not unfamiliar with it. I use it for my writing website, and used the free version when I first started that one. It’s not entirely unfamiliar. But know that if you are currently using Blogger, WordPress isn’t super different. Its interface definitely is – things are not set up the same way – but the meat of it, the actually blogging part, isn’t.

 

The other thing that has had me thinking about this for a while is hosting. Hosting essentially is about who owns your content. On Blogger, Google does. Technically, your content isn’t yours. I’ve heard horror stories of people waking up and finding their blog gone because they violated the terms & conditions in some way. I don’t know how likely that is, but the fact of the matter is that now I own all of my content. That is huge to me and what made me really want to switch to WordPress.

 

What has made me extra happy to be here is everything I can do with WordPress. The plugins are amazing and have helped me make my posts more SEO friendly, keep track of everything going on, and make this blog more user-friendly overall. In fact, within the past week, my bounce rate has decreased; the number of pageviews, users, and sessions has increased; and the average session has increased in length. I was feeling rather stuck in my statistics, having barely grown in the past month or so, and WordPress changed that.

 

The fact of the matter is that I am not technically skilled enough to have made the switch to WordPress myself and I really didn’t want to part with the money for someone to do it for me. It isn’t a cheap thing, at least by my standards. So if you can’t do it now, just make the most of where you are. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself if you don’t feel like you can do it. But if you can, I would. It has already made my life a lot better, and it hasn’t even been a week yet.

 

Kate