A ton of old posts are still mis-directed to wrong URL’s which just go to my 404 error page, however it seemed traffic quickly recovered in a few days:

I really hate the Google Analytics versions of my NevBlog stats because I have many pages and files that ARE NOT setup with the tracking code….also visitors to my XML feed don’t get counted, and those are a pretty significant chunk of traffic.

The actual server stats look more like this:

ahhh….that’s more like it!

Here were some basic stats right before the switch:

Stats on 3-1-2010:
NevBlog Alexa: 173,357
Yahoo Pages Indexed: 761
Bing Pages Indexed: 3,170
Google Pages Indexed: 670

Stats on 5-11-2010 (today):
NevBlog Alexa: 148,440
Yahoo Pages Indexed: 1,204
Bing Pages Indexed: 511
Google Pages Indexed: 890

So it seems I actually went up in Alexa ranking (although that’s probably due to writing more often) and it’s EASIER for search engines to find me with WordPress.  I think what really helped with Google (my main source of traffic) was a great WordPress plugin called Google Sitemap Generator which let Google automatically know where all my pages were.  Anyone with a WordPress blog needs that plugin.

Well, I’m off!
-Neville (The guy with a bunch of readers everyday)

It actually feels kind of like a real life move.

THE GOOD:

• Updating WordPress is WAY easier.  I used the self-hosted FTP version of Blogger, which means anytime I want to update anything on the main template, my ENTIRE site is erased from my server then re-uploaded via FTP…EVERY SINGLE TIME.
• Customization and Plugins: There’s a plugin for pretty much anything on WordPress.
• Migration was easy with the newly improved Blogger to WordPress tool (included with WordPress).  There was also great 301 re-direct method I used (Shout out to Adam for notifying me of this helpful BlogBloke post).  It’s not perfect, but it worked about 75% of the time to re-direct old posts to new posts (like this).

THE BAD:

• Adsense revenue went down from roughly $12/day to $3/day (probably because I currently have one ad instead of three).
• I can spot a WordPress blog from a mile away.  They all have a relatively generic feel to them, even the cool looking and highly personalized themes.  The Blogger template felt old, clunky and ugly…but it was unbelievably easy to navigate the site I felt.  I’ll try to add some of the user friendliness back in.
• Traffic dropped just slightly since people across the internet were getting to my site via broken links….but this is just a personal blog so who cares.  You can always access the old NevBlog by taking any URL and adding /old right after the nevblog.com.

I purposely got a template that maintains a relatively narrow reading area because I like reading like that.  The old Blogger template let me have images:

The new WordPress template can handle images only slightly bigger:

Anyways, enough blog talk.  If you see any weird issues, please notify via comments.  I’ll be continuously updating the template for the next week, but feedback is greatly appreciated!

-Neville

—UPDATE—
Small interesting side note, while trying to quickly finish up this post, the library closed and I got locked in.   Me and a homeless guy had to break out of the library!