Blogspot to Wordpress: Easy and Smart Conversion

It was an interesting but not unusual challenge – to move a popular blog from one hosting platform to another, without interruption. Like so many bloggers, my friend Steve Kayser started his popular blog – Riffs, Tiffs and What Ifs – on Blogspot a couple of years ago and came to realize Blogspot’s limitations and lack of  features. The objective was to move Riffs from Blogspot to a self-hosted Wordpress blog platform.

What I had noticed when visiting Steve’s Blogspot site was lack of speed. Blogspot is slow … very slow … quite possibly because so many people are using the free service.

After Steve registered a new domain name – www.writingriffs.com – and signed-up with InMotionHosting to host his blog, my first task was to import all of the posts, comments, images, tags and categories from his Blogspot site.  Blogspot does not offer a method for exporting or archiving a blog on its service but Wordpress has a magic feature to import Blogspot into Wordpress. What it essentially does is to clone everything from Blogspot into the Wordpress database. And, the Wordpress import function works easily and perfectly.

Steve chose Solostream’s WP-Vybe theme, which I believe is one of the best new themes available for Wordpress. We took advantage of WP-Vybe’s easy customization features to change colors and formatting.

The new WritingRiffs.com has a variety of behind-the-scenes plugins for Wordpress to drive SEO, security and feeds, including Google Analytics, Google sitemap generator, Feedburner, and the All-in-one-SEO pack.

And, here’s what I find most striking – WritingRiffs.com now runs at lightning speed.