It has been a while since my last SEO related post, so I thought today I would put a quick update together on the recent changes to lurchhoundloves.com and why I decided to migrate from Blogger to WordPress!

Why Is Self-Hosted WordPress Better Than Blogger?

For a while now I have been wanting to move my blog across from hosting my own domain on Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress site. One reason being, as I was on the same IP address as a thousand other URLs, amongst other things. Don’t get me wrong, Blogger has been great to me over the past couple years of blogging, but as my site is evolving and in a sense becoming a business for me, I thought there was no better time than the present to take the plunge to a self-hosted WordPress site. Which, means that I now invest in a monthly hosting plan to allow greater freedom and SEO opportunities for my website. As previously I wasn’t paying anything for my hosting, just around £12 for domain name renewal.

Below are three reasons I decided to switch to self-hosted WordPress over Blogger:

1. For Full Ownership & Creativity Of My Blog Design

Blogger has it’s limitations when it comes to templates and messing around with CSS or HTML. WordPress gives me greater control over creativity of my website and the visual aesthetic. Now my CSS and HTML knowledge is probably rather minimal, but I have been enjoying learning more on the coding site of getting Lurchhoundloves to where I want it to be, without shelling out the earth for a developer or new full site re-design. When setting up my new WordPress self hosted site I purchase this Coastal theme with the Genesis framework for around £30, implemented this myself and also made the changes / tweak so far on my own. I have been wanting a site landing page forever, so I would love feedback on what you think on the new design and my homepage design.

2. An Abundance of WordPress Plugins For Functionality

Similar to the vast options for creativity when designing your WordPress website, WordPress plugins also allow greater functionality on your site and for you to add these yourself without the need for a developer to create new modules for your blog. Some of my favourites are Contact Form 7, the Yoast SEO Plugin and also the new Jetpack addition that WordPress now provides for better website performance and stats.

3. For Better SEO & Working Opportunities

As a platform, WordPress is usually the first choice for any SEO looking to build a new website. In addition to the positive points above, WordPress websites are actually easier to optimise than Blogger and have a number of tools that help. For one, the Yoast tool mentioned above helps to optimise each and every page on your website for your target keywords and gives hints and tips on how to improve each page optimisation for search engines. Also, WordPress easily helps you to link between pages and posts on your site and automatically pings search engines to crawl your site with every new post that is put live.

By making the move to self-hosted wordpress my site is now on an IP address and server that is hosting less sites than Blogger. From an SEO perspective, when looking to build links for a client campaign we would not want to choose websites that are all hosted on the same IP. So, compared to having my website hosted with over 1000 other domains, I now only share a server with about four other sites. Obviously, you have to pay for this advantage, but as I am looking to grow Lurchhoundlove’s reach and opportunities for brands that I can work with, this will also hopefully be an advantage for my ongoing hard work.

How I Migrated From Blogger to WordPress

So, I may have said today’s post was going to be a short one, but I have managed to blab on in my three points above. Rather than turn this post into an essay I am thinking of doing a post (or multiple broken down posts) on how I actually migrated my blog from Blogger to WordPress. Including the costs involved and information on the hosting provider I went with and my experience from start to finish. If this is something you would be interested to read, please let me know in the comments below and I can start to plan putting that together for the next posts in this series.

As always, thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post please leave me your feedback in the comments below or by tweeting @CharlotteLewis_ and feel free to follow me on the social channels listed below for updates or to give this post some love and share with the buttons below!

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