My Journey from Weebly to My New Home WordPress

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Starting fresh is never easy, no matter how big or small the change may be. You have to be willing to put in the time and sweat to make something new your new normal. Recently, I had to make a fresh start when I transferred this blog from Weebly to my new home, WordPress. And boy was it a 2-week challenge.

If you’ve ever wanted to start a blog or you’re in search of a place to start up 1, let me save you the trouble and research and tell you, GO WITH WORDPRESS! But if you’ve already gone with anything other than WordPress and you’re deciding to migrate over then it will take time and dedication to do so. It all depends on how much you have to transfer.

Now, this is not to bash any other service. I really did enjoy my time using Weebly. It was easy to set up and the themes were pretty interesting and colorful. But after a while, I noticed that there were things that limited me from improving on the look of the site and services. And after 6 months, I was ready to step up my blogging game.

Weebly vs. WordPress

I can definitely see why a beginner blogger would consider Weebly as their 1st choice. Weebly is very beginner user-friendly, offering easy-to-use features that make piecing together your vision for your website just a snap of the fingers. They use a drag and drop editor that allows you to structure your website without having any programming experience. And their content library has a list of useful add-ons to help further your website experience.

On the other hand, you might look at WordPress as the difficult older sibling. WordPress is an open-source website builder that allows you more freedom to modify your website to your liking. It offers an abundance of plug-ins to help you with such things as social media icons, Gutenberg Blocks which makes it easier for you to structure your blog posts, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) assistance, and more. It’s more difficult to use and time-consuming compared to Weebly but there are 1000s of tutorials and community forums to help guide you along.

Both services offer their clients a great library of tools and features. So in my eyes, you can’t go wrong with either 1. However, WordPress is used by millions, and services such as Google Ads and Amazon advertising programs, to name a few are easily equipped for WordPress. After weighing the pros and cons, my decision was much clearer for me.

Setting Up My New Hosting Service

After researching a few resources online many users suggested Bluehost as a great hosting service. They are already partnered with WordPress as a trusted hosting company. They’re easy to set up and as of now, they have a deal starting at $2.95/month with a free domain name for the 1st year, and a 30 day money-back guarantee. Customer service is very polite and helpful.

I have to say that although it’s only been 2 weeks, I’m very satisfied with Bluehost.

Transferring My Work from Weebly to WordPress

So now that I had my new hosting service all set up with a clean WordPress canvas, you’re probably wondering what was next. Well, I had to figure out how to transfer all 45 pieces of my written work and multiple images from 1 location to the other. And that’s where WPBeginner came into play. Not only did they have an easy-to-use tutorial on how to transfer from 1 site to the other but they also had an easy-to-use import tool, Weebly to WordPress Importer to make the process a breeze. A form pops up and you simply fill out everything.

I did run into a small error, but I quickly contacted their customer service about it and they quickly helped me with the transfer all in 1 day. And it actually worked. All my stuff was moved over just like that.

Modifying and Reformatting to WordPress from Weebly

After seeing all my work transferred over, it was time to put in the hard work of revamping everything into something new. This was the difficult part of this whole process because all the posts and images had to be formatted back to their original state. And being completely overwhelmed thanks to my anxiety, I thought I wasn’t going to ever see my blog back in 1 piece ever again.

But with a deep breath, I started off by looking at some tutorials and playing around with the different options on my WordPress dashboard. With all my blog posts waiting for a new home, I had to set up a page to house them all. So I created 4 pages (Home, About, Contact, Blog). And from there I began to build the foundation of the new website.

And through a lot of trial and error, I was able to reformat all 30 posts within a 3-day span. I would be lying if I didn’t say I celebrated with a self-high five after formatting the last 1. Once the Blog page was created, the only thing left to do was go to Settings ~ Reading ~ Under Your homepage display,  set the Posts page to your blog page. And I was all set! (If you have a home page separate from your blog page, in this section you’d set your home page to your customized home page)

Learning the WordPress Ropes

As a beginner, I can say do not expect to jump right into WordPress as if it’s Weebly. It is not. There were times during the process where I wanted to pull my hair out because I was unfamiliar with how to create pages, resize images or place my logo on the page as a header (I’m still working on that). But once all the shock of unfamiliar territory wore off, I buckled down.

There is a lot that comes with running a WordPress website and a lot to learn. But I can say start off with the basics. What I didn’t understand, I researched online and was able to walk myself through it.

Here is just a quick rundown of what I did to get you started as both new or if you’re transferring over from another site:

1. Select a theme

There is a huge library of both free and premium themes to choose and it can become overwhelming. So don’t worry. There is a preview for each 1 to give you an idea of what they would look like. My suggestion is to become familiar with the filters to help narrow down the search. Once you’ve found 1 that you like, install and activate it. I personally downloaded a few as my final choices to get a feel for working with them. Whether you’re new or coming over for the 1st time, pick a theme for your website that best fits your vision.

2. Add Pages & Content to Your Site

Now that you have your theme, you’ll need to fancy up your new home. On your WordPress dashboard, you’ll find the pages tab to create your pages. Once you highlight it, click on Add New and it will create a page. Typically, as a blogger you’d have Home, About Me, Contact, and Blog as your pages but you can customize your pages the way you see fit.

Unfortunately, 1 of my pages didn’t make it through the transfer so I had to recreate my homepage. And while my posts and their comments came over without a scratch, they had no page of their own. So I had to recreate that page as well.

3. Create/Reformat Your 1st Blog Post

After you have added your pages, now it’s time to add your post to the new Blog page. For 1st timers, you would go to the Post tab and click on Add New. But if you’re like me then once you link your transferred post to the new Blog page then all your posts will be connected to your newly made Blog page and ready to reformat in the design you’d like.

4. Add Plug-ins, Font and Color Scheme Changes

You’ll learn that Plug-ins will be your best friend. They make it easier for you to design and run your website if you are unfamiliar with CSS & HTML. You can also change the font and color scheme of your site by going through the Appearance tab then the Customize option. Have fun playing around with the different colors and fonts. Find something that brings your personality to your pages. My favorite color is blue so I had to put that on my new site.

Conclusion

And there you have it. This was my 2-week journey from Weebly to my new home, WordPress. Now that I’m 90% through the process of transferring, I can say that I’m glad I made the switch. But boy was it a task to get to this point. My suggestion is, if you have the money to have an external service do this step for you then I say go for it. But if you don’t, then make sure you set aside the patience and time for the manual switch. Trust me, in the end, you won’t regret it.

Until next time, this is Tammy saying keep strong, keep positive, and nothing’s impossible!!!