For years, Steves.life has been a self-hosted blog, however I’ve been toying with the idea of migrating it to WordPress.com. There are many reasons for my decision, the main one being that I can focus on writing and not have to play engineer when something gos wrong. One other really neat advantage of hosting with WordPress directly is that if you receive my posts by Email and want to comment, you can simply do so by replying directly to the Email. I have no idea how many people may or may not use this feature, but it’s always bothered me a bit that readers needed to activate a link in the email just to write a comment, especially given that just replying would be so much easier. Hey wait, not currently subscribed by Email, but wish you were?
The real thing I wanted to write about today though is just how easy the migration process actually was. I decided to move everything over the Labor Day weekend figuring that I would have extra time to fix anything that might go wrong. What I didn’t anticipate though was the process taking less than an hour. WordPress publishes fantastic, easy-to-follow documentation on how to migrate a self-hosted site to their platform. Even better, with paid plans, WordPress “Happiness engineers” are available through live chat to assist with the entire process. And yes, WordPress really does call them Happiness engineers which might just be one of the coolest job titles ever.
I’m really excited with just how smoothly the migration process went and am excited to start utilizing some of the features that weren’t easily available to me before. I still have some small things to configure, but for the most part, everything is up and running, that is, assuming this post publishes successfully. 🙂
The Thoughts and Ramblings of Steve 
13 replies on “The easiest site migration ever.”
Given that the comment by email feature seems to be working for others, this may be the last of your articles I read in the browser. It even makes me want to start a blog myself!
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My friend, I think it would be wonderful if you would start a blog. If you decide to do it, let me know if there’s any way I can help. I have a post coming up soon on the WordPress Gutenberg block editor, it is an adventure unto itself. I do like the Email reply feature, I hope people will use it. One thing to note though is that the Email feature is only available if you host with WordPress.com, you can’t do it with self-hosted blogs, not even with paid Jetpack plans. Anyway, always happy to chat more about this with you if ever you’d like. 🙂
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Thank you! I had one in Spanish many years ago. rober555x.blogspot.com. That was in my previous life, before coming to the US. I will definitely consider it, so… you may receive a phone call.
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Well, you can always call any time. 🙂 I’m not sure if you would do one in English, Spanish, or even both, but Spanish might be interesting because I don’t know how many A T resources and such are actually available in Spanish. You could even do a podcast, like the Spanish version of AppleVis or something. Can you podcast using WordPress? Why yes, yes you can. 🙂
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Oh boy! I’m commenting to test the reply with email to post a comment feature, but also because the fields for entering email address to subscribe and to submit are not in English. This, in case you might not know this. They say:
E-posta adresi, and:
Abone Ol.
This is intriguing and amusing but… :0)
I’m glad to see that the migration went well. 😀
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Hmm this is strange as when I previewed the post, the form was in English. More disturbing, I’m not exactly sure how to change its language, hmm, I may have a new unexpected project. 🙂
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Peekaboo I see you well sort of kind of like heeheehee. I can read the post anyway so yay you and yay happiness engineers which I agree is the coolest job title like ever in all of job titles. It makes me want to know one or be one or something. It just sounds so fabulous you can’t help but smile when you read or say it.
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Yay, I’m so glad the reply via Email thing is working. Not sure if you’ll get my reply to your reply, but one thing at a time. 🙂
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I hate to burst your bubble, but WordPress isn’t as cool as it’s cracked up to be. I’m glad you had a positive experience moving your blog, but have you tried their block editor? It’s fairly accessible with screen readers but not as intuitive as the classic editor. I’ve figured out how to do some things but not everything. Fortunately, the classic editor is still available but who knows for how long?
Of course, you may be using wordpres.org with a paid plan so may not have this problem. I think my website, which uses WordPress but is hosted by someone else, is that way. In any case, if you can figure out how to use the block editor, maybe you could post an article on it. Happy blogging!
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Actually, in my drafts, is a post on the very subject of the block editor. It is definitely, well, interesting, but doable. That is the one major jrawback of most of the WordPress.com plans though, you can’t use the classic editor with them. That said, if you’re not hosting with WordPress, the Classic Editor plugin is still going to be supported for quite a while, I’ll be sure to put the date in my post. But very glad you called this out as learning the block editor has definitely been its own adventure of sorts. 🙂
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Well, I’ve considered moving my blog to my website, but I’m not sure if it’s worth losing followers. Another alternative would be to insert blog posts on my website, then reblog them to my blog on wordpress.com but folks would then need to take an extr step to read my posts, and I might lose followers as a result of that. I looked into connecting my website to my blog so posts on my website would automatically appear on my blog, but there’s no way to do that. So, I’m definitely interested in reading anything you have to say about using the block editor.
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I had similar thoughts and similar struggles and in the end, at least for me, I realized I was probably overthinking it a bit. Knowing that you’re not a fan of the block editor, is there another blogging platform you prefer? I think that the easiest way is to have your site and blog on the same platform, but another option might be to put a blog page on your site and populate it with dynamically updating content from your blog. I’ll definitely try to get that Gutenberg post out soon though. WordPress definitely has its issues, but so far, I’ve just not found anything better and as easy to use, not without sacrificing functionality of one sort or another.
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If this comment posts, then posting via email reply is working as expected. 🙂 >
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