The Move from Blogger to WordPress

Last updated on 29 March 2022

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Making the change from Blogger to WordPress

It’s been about 6 weeks now that the blog has been This Splendid Shambles and not From L&P to English Tea. I thought I’d do a quick update as to what it’s been like, moving from Blogger to WordPress and to be a self-hosted blog. It’s been a big change and going through it, it turns out, is not only exhausting, but it’s a bit scary.

The Name Change

Changing the blog name hasn’t had too much of an impact. I have a feeling that I don’t actually have too many followers who don’t have one of the social media platforms that I share posts and images on. This means that most people either were notified about the change (on Facebook when I changed the name of my Facebook page, and on Bloglovin’ when I moved followers across to This Splendid Shambles), or they just found out when they went to the URL of From L&P to English Tea.

The Actual Move

Moving across from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress was actually more simple than I thought. Perhaps it was due to the fact that I meticulously followed these great instructions from Dana at Wonder Forest. If you’re thinking of moving and want to know how to do it, or you are moving then these are great instructions, well laid out, well written and very easy to follow.

I’m currently hosted with Bluehost, which is so far so good. I haven’t had any problems and signing up, paying, and getting a general idea of the site, and what the features are within it was all easy and straightforward.

Update: Since writing this post I have moved to Lyrical Host, which I highly recommend.

The Content Shift

Moving across from Blogger to WordPress may have been easy, but the worst thing about it was that all my formatting of posts went ballistic. All the posts were copied across, and while the text was all there, the pictures were all there, it was all squashed overlapping on itself. I’ve been going through all the posts (nearly 2,000 of them) and clearing the formatting, and making sure the images are the right size and everything is fine and dandy.

What.A.Mission. (Please don’t tell me if there’s a plugin that fixes that instantly – I think I’d cry.) Though I complain, it has actually been quite useful, going through all my old posts. Some of them I stop and re-read and think ‘this is pretty good. I like this’ and others I just think ‘oh my word, I can’t believe I wrote that’.

There have been a few posts that I’ve just deleted, those that were less than a paragraph long and had no real content but were obviously me in a bored state apologising for not having anything to blog about, but on the whole, I’ve kept them there. While some of the older posts are badly written, they have overuse of exclamation marks, have no images and are just plain embarrassing, they are still a part of my blogging journey, and it’s amazing to be able to look back like that see just how far I’ve come (cue Let’s See How far We’ve Come, by Matchbox 20).

The Images

Another thing I’ve been struggling with a little bit is to do with images. All my images were set to a certain pixel width for Blogger, but you could change it easily and have it small, medium, large, or full size. On WordPress I couldn’t manage to do that, but I’ve found a plugin that makes that easier now. The images and how you add them to the media library, and how you insert them into a post are all different, however, it’s just one of those things that I have to get used to. And I am, so we’re looking more positive now.

The Conclusion

So far I’m enjoying WordPress. There is so much more that I can do with plugins and in terms of layout and design that it’s giving me a lot more freedom to be creating the blog that I really want. You may have noticed that the book reviews now have information and details about the book, as well as where you can purchase them from. I’ve always thought that was such a great idea and would have loved to add it to my posts. I used a plugin called Ultimate Book Blogger from Nose Graze and it’s fantastic.

All in all, I’m so glad I finally just took the leap, made the change. I’m loving This Splendid Shambles, and while From L&P to English Tea will always be in my heart and will still very much be present around here, everything has its time, and it was time to move on.

Big shout out to Ria from Thoroughly Modern Millennial, who answered my questions about how she made the change from Wishing for Chanel to TMM. Thank you, Ria, for your patience and your answers! You were a big help!

Have you ever moved from Blogger to WordPress? How did it go?