As I’m sure you’ve seen if you’ve made your way to my website, it looks a fair bit different than it did when hosted by Blogger. I’ve migrated my posts over and, while there is a bit of work to do, I wanted to introduce it to you. It is now running on WordPress.

WordPress Hosting with BlueHost

The guide to setting up a blog that I used was this entry at WPBeginner. Per its recommendation, I decided to use BlueHost as a hosting provider and purchased the Plus plan (the $4.95 / month plan as of the writing of this post). The only thing that surprised me was that it needed to be paid for 36 months up front. This shouldn’t be a big deal for companies but might be a bit much for an individual.

Domain and DNS

I purchased the taylorbuiltsolutions.com domain through Google Domains. Because of this and because I purchased G Suite for email I decided to keep the domain there. It wasn’t too difficult to change the name servers to BlueHost’s nameservers as seen in the following screenshot. The only issue I ran into was that I had to turn off DNSSEC before changing away from Google’s nameservers.

Fixing Emails Not Arriving in G Suite

Once I got the name servers changed the new site started loading upon going to taylorbuiltsolutions.com. However, once this started happening I noticed that I wasn’t getting emails at my new G Suite email address ([email protected]). It took a bit of searching, but I was able to find that two things needed to happen:

• Add the appropriate MX records to the domain area in Bluehost including the MX record used to do domain verification. I happened to have these already setup in Google Domains and copied them.
• Modify the @ SPF record include: _spf.google.com

WordPress Plugins

To migrate my posts from blogger I initially tried using the WordPress blogger importer. It is designed to upload posts from blogger you’ve backed up from Blogger as an XML file. This worked on the WordPress install that I had running locally via Varying Vagrant Vagrants. However, once WordPress was running on Bluehost, this stopped running for some reason. Instead of taking the time to investigate what was going wrong I decided to use Blogger Importer Extended by Pipdig. It works by connecting to the Blogger APIs and pulling all the posts over that way. It does mean that you need to give the plugin permission to access your Blogger.

As mentioned in my post on migrating to WordPress, I’m using UpdraftPlus Pro for taking backups. For a theme, I’m using EmpowerWP. Lastly, as recommended by the WPBeginner guide, I signed up for Google Analytics and installed the Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin by MonsterInsight.

Things Yet To Do

There are plenty of things left for me to do as of the writing of this post. These include:

• Setting categories for each of the posts
• Select appropriate featured images for each of the posts (I picked my logo as the default logo)
• Make sure all the links I’ve shared in the past still match with the permalinks of the posts.
• DNSSEC — get the appropriate records setup so that DNSSEC works between Google Domains and Bluehost
• Get the new links indexed on Google and Bing
• Add links to social media and email somewhere sensible on the blog

Conclusion

Thank you for visiting my new blog! Please let me know what you think of the site and if you have any recommendations for making it look better. You can reach me via email at [email protected] or on Twitter @TRPriceSoftware (though I should change that handle now that my domain is more officially up and running!)