After nearly a decade on Blogger, I moved my blog to WordPress.org and became self-hosted.
For years, I had heard people talk about self-hosting, but the process intimidated me. It required money, technical knowledge and a level of commitment I was unsure I could justify.
A question kept stopping me: What if I was not serious enough about blogging?
I worried that I would invest in the website, lose interest and leave another unfinished project behind.
Eventually, I realised that this uncertainty had shaped more than my choice of blogging platform. I often held back from giving my full effort to the things I cared about. Writing mattered deeply to me, yet I treated the blog as something temporary.
Moving to WordPress became a way of changing that.
Sorting Through the Past
The migration began with the archive.
I had published more than 600 posts over the years. I spent more than a week reading through them and deciding what still belonged on the new site.
Only 45 remained.
Some posts captured moments I still valued. Others felt tied to versions of myself I no longer needed to preserve publicly.
Deleting them was surprisingly easy. The difficult part was accepting that the years of writing had served their purpose, even when the work itself did not need to follow me.
Once the archive was ready, I bought a domain and hosting package, installed WordPress and began the migration.
Learning the Technical Side
The process was less difficult than I had imagined, although it required patience.
I read about hosting, storage, bandwidth, plug-ins and the WordPress dashboard. Each unfamiliar term became manageable once I had a reason to understand it.
Customising the theme took the most time.
The free version limited several design options, so I learned enough CSS to adjust the elements myself. Each time I found the correct selector and watched the page change in the customiser, I felt a small rush of accomplishment.
I had promised myself that I would buy a theme from Etsy and hire someone to help if I was still unhappy by Monday. Solving the problems myself saved me about RM200.
The finished website is simple.
I like it that way.
Its plain appearance does not show the hours spent sorting posts, reading instructions, testing code and correcting mistakes. I know what went into it.
A Different Kind of Beginning
This is the first post I am publishing from the new WordPress dashboard.
The move has not suddenly made me a more disciplined writer. It has not given me a publishing schedule or guaranteed that more people will read my work.
It has given the blog a proper home.
For the first time, I have built a space for my writing with the expectation that I will remain.
Welcome to the new site.
Leave a Reply