You may have noticed a 2 month gap between this post and the last one. Wish I could say I was on an extended vacation, but I wasn’t. And I haven’t given up on blogging either. The reason I stopped blogging 2 months ago, is that I came to the realization that I was not happy with my current Content Management System and it was time to move on. Since I was blogging on a weekly basis for about 9 months, that meant not only moving my web site but also moving all of the blog articles as well. The more I blogged, the more pages I had to move, so I stopped.
The process was more painful than I thought and so this is why my first post back is to warn you – Be Picky. Be Well Informed. Choose your blogging software wisely.
My site was running on Hubspot – which by the way is a great product (I’ll save the details for a future post) – but it just wasn’t a good fit for me. Because web sites are my business, I will often try new products and software before recommending them to my clients. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, but in the long run I always learn something and believe that I can provide better services to my clients because of my experience.
The move was to WordPress. In my humble opinion, if you plan to blog then WordPress is the platform of choice. I’ve been working with WordPress for a few years now and my clients love it!
OK. Now for the pain. I decided not to change the look & feel because I just updated my site last August and am still very happy with it. But I still needed to rebuild the site for WordPress and spent some time updating the copy. Then I had to tackle the blog. Transferring all of the blog articles & photos, adding SEO, re-creating the tags and categories – this was just the start. As I was doing this, I realized that every article, every tag, every category, every archive — was on a different page and all of these pages were in Google. ARRRRRRRRG!
When you move your blog or website to a new CMS or blogging platform, chances are the new software will have its own naming conventions. So even if you keep the same content, the pages will most likely have different names. This is especially true for your blog articles. So I had to do something to make sure that Google could find my newly relocated pages. Otherwise people would receive Page not Found errors, I would lose valuable traffic and hurt my page rank in Google. So for each of these pages, I set up a permanent redirect to tell Google where each page was. Luckily for me, WordPress has a plug-in for this, but I still had to manually type in the old and new names for each page.
Other downfalls to moving your blog…
- You’ll lose your subscriber list. You need to contact everyone on your list and have them re-confirm their subscription due to anti-spam laws. [So please enter your contact info in the subscribe box at the left if you want to keep receiving email notifications of new articles!]
- You also lose your comments. There really is no way to transfer comments. Bummer.
So heed my advice. Choose your blogging software wisely. Think long-term and make sure your cms software will support any future features you are hoping to implement. You’ll be happy you did!