#bloggingedumacation – Why I Chose WordPress

So, I thought it’d be a good time to talk about why I chose WordPress. More specifically Self-Hosted WordPress.

For me, I felt it was time to make the switch because I just felt like I had this nagging thing sitting on my shoulder saying “You could lose all of your content.”  “You don’t have full control over your content.”  “What happens if Google changes something?” “Their Terms of Service says they have free reign to use your content in any which way they want AND they can make a change to how you access your account whenever they feel like it.”

Here is a snippet of Google’s TOS:

“Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.” Found Here.

I just didn’t feel comfortable growing any larger on Blogger. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some very successful bloggers still running on Blogger. I actually asked a couple of them why they were still on Blogger and their response was “Why fix what’s not broke?” I agree to an extent.

But what happens if you get shut down? I’ve known several mommy bloggers on the Blogger platform who were shut down because Google thought they were spam. Seriously. One of my high school friend’s who was just using her blog as a daily journal of her growing family lost her content. She was shut down. It took her over a week to get Google to re-release it back to her. She didn’t run ads. She didn’t accept sponsors. She didn’t write reviews. She just journal-ed about her life.

She was at least lucky. I met another mommy blogger at a conference this summer who wasn’t so lucky. She lost everything. And wasn’t able to get any of it back. That’s hard-learned #bloggingedumacation at it’s finest.

Not to scare you. But that uncomfortable thought had been nagging at me since I heard her story. From that moment, I knew that I eventually wanted to make the switch. But I wasn’t quite ready to learn a whole new platform.

Now, the other reason I wanted to switch was SEO (Search Engine Optimization). WordPress has a better SEO quality right out of the box, but there are some wonderful plug-ins you can use to add some more boost.

So what is SEO? Well, it’s basically the sites that pop up to the top of any search engine search. So, let’s say I blog about red stripe fuzzy blankets. If you were to search for that phrase in a search engine, my site will more than likely be closer to the top because I’ve got SEO working in my favor. I’ve got little robots working behind the scenes making my content more searchable so that when someone keys in something that I’ve blogged about, I have a much better chance to jump to the top of that search result list.

That equates to more pageviews and more traffic…ie. more potential readers.

Those are the main reasons I switched. Content ownership and SEO results.

Have you thought about switching to Self-Hosted WordPress (if you are still on the Blogger platform)? If you are already on WordPress, what are your thoughts?


Want to continue on learning in my #bloggingedumacation series? Click here!