If you were originally a Blogger blogger, like me, who made their first website with Google blogging platform, you will no doubt feel at home with using Blogger as a blogging platform (wow, I mentioned ‘blog’ five times in that above sentence – go the SEO of this article)!

However, as you will have become aware of from reading articles online regarding Blogger and WordPress, the vast majority of professional bloggers do, in fact, use WordPress as their blogging platform. There are many reasons for this, such as the fact you have complete control and an open source market for plugins and themes. So, if you feel you are now in the situation where you want to migrate from Blogger to WordPress, fear not my friend. Here are a few ways you can get use to WordPress without making it, at best, a painful experience.

#1 Make a Rubbish Free Blog

The best way to learn to use WordPress is to start from scratch and create a free blog. Although the blog will be all for nothing, the objective to creating this is to enable yourself to get use to the format and structure of WordPress and, in particularly, how it differs from Blogger.

What you will find is that many of the features in Blogger are in WordPress: the main difference is in where they are located. From making a cheap and cheerful blog, you can test out the WordPress platform and find all of the features you were so use to in Blogger in WordPress.

#2 Download a Few Themes

What I found to be a large difference between Blogger and WordPress is the fact that the themes and templates that you could upload to a Blogger website were an .xml file which you can edit as a HTML file. From using and editing in HTML, I have become quite an expert in adapting and creating themes in HTML. However, WordPress themes are not .xml files but zipped files with more files inside it. As well as this, you cannot edit themes in HTML coding language but a different coding language: php.

On the whole, php is very similar to HTML. But, it does have a few differences. Therefore, what I would recommend is downloading a few themes in your new WordPress blog and testing how to edit certain areas of it to produce some test features. As well as getting to grips with php coding, it will also help you understand how to use the WordPress platform for managing and customising themes.

#3 Download a Few Plugins

The great thing about WordPress is no doubt the millions of plugins to use. Similar to downloading an app on a smartphone, it is as simple as downloading a plugin and activating it to gain the benefits and features of that plugin. However, for a first time user, this could be a little confusing with regards to the implementation of plugins and the type of plugins available to WordPress users. Therefore, try and download and use a few free plugins just so you can get an idea to how plugins work in WordPress.