Moving from Wordpress to Micro Blog

Moving my website or blog from one place to another is something I’ve delayed for too long. I’ve been hosting a Wordpress site at Hostgator for over 10 years with 100’s of posts, photos & cross links.

I’ve no idea why but I felt Wordpress was getting a bit overweight, even if I chose a minimalist theme it still seemed slow & sluggish.

I think the process started when I deleted Instagram from my phone and started looked at Bluesky & Mastadon for the odd social posts. This led me to the iOS Tapestry app which allows me to follow my interests from all over the web without the junky adverts.

I then came across Micro.Blog and tried it for $1 a month. Micro Blog allowed me to post to one location and auto post to Bluesky, Mastadon, threads & LinkedIn. Rather than opening each app and posting the same thing over and over.

I had a play around, found the Bear theme and absolutely loved it. I feel now days most people visit websites on a mobile so having something minimal and fast is the way forward.

The below pagespeed results seemed impossible with Wordpress:

I then looked at the premium package and decided to go all in with 5 blogs/sites. With custom domains this gave me the option to host on an EU server which seems better than Hostgators US only servers.

Part of the frustration with my Wordpress site was I had 2 different products entwined, I needed to untangle it & split it to two different sites. I offer real balloons & virtual balloons and visitors don’t want to see confusing menus and links that are not relevant.

With the 5 sites I could have one for both products, one for my social blog, one for my wife’s dog grooming business and what then hell…. a blog for my daughter.

To add to the workload I had 20 years of Gmail emails in 2 Google Workspace accounts which I wanted to simplify into iCloud whilst moving the domains. This is so much easier in iCloud, all emails go into 1 account rather than multiple inboxes.

Overall I think it took me 10 days on and off. I started by importing everything into micro blog. I adjusted some images and cross links, removed all YouTube videos and then redirected page links. The last task was repointing the domain names which I did over a bank holiday weekend for minimum disruption.

Finally the most satisfying part was cancelling my Hostgator & Google Workspace accounts.