Depending on the route you took to get into making your own website and blogging will determine what blogging platform you first chose to use. For those that felt confident, they may have gone straight into blogging. Whereas, on the other hand, those that first encountered blogging and were unsure what to do may have gone for the easier-to-understand platform being Google’s Blogger. If you decided to go for Blogger, there will be a time in your blogging career where you will question the title of this article, ‘should you transfer from Blogger to WordPress?’. The are both benefits and drawbacks to transferring a Blogger website to WordPress, for which I will go into below.

+ Gain Control of Content

An inherent problem with Blogger is how the content on your website is hosted. Since you do not pay for hosting with Blogger, it is Google that hosts your content and have control over it. Yes, that means if Google decided to call it a day for hosting blogs on Blogger, then your content could be lost. I am not saying they are going to do this. However, the control is in their hands.

WordPress, on the other hand, requires the owner of websites to pay for hosting which ultimately means the owner has control over it. For many bloggers out there, this is a must, especially if they are thinking of selling the website.

– Tranferring will Cost

Transferring from Blogger to WordPress will cost quite a bit, although you could argue that these are the typical costs of starting a website anyway (Blogger is the exception that you can, pretty much, blog for free, excluding the domain name purchase). Costs associated to the transfer could include:

• Hosting cost – this is probably the biggest cost and will range considerably depending on how much storage and server space you want online for your website.
• SSL certificate – as it stands, there is no way, as of yet, to get an SSL certificate for a Blogger hosted website. When you transfer to WordPress, it is worthy to pay for an SSL certificate.
• Time – transferring from Blogger to WordPress is a very delicate and, potentially, lengthy process, for which I will go into detail about how to do in another article on PPC.org – you will need some spare time in order to transfer the blog successfully.

+ WordPress is Open Platform

WordPress is very attractive for websites since it is an open platform for anyone to develop themes and plugins for. This utlimately means that there are thousands, if not millions of plugins and themes you can use to shape your website the way you want it to look with the features you want it to have.

– SEO Drop?

As with any big change to a website, you can limit the traffic drop or SEO drop. However, a 2+ year old website from Blogger to WordPress may result in a temporary/permanent drop in SEO and traffic if not transferred correctly.