Why I Broke Up With Tumblr For WordPress

I may haven’t mentioned it before but I’ve tried several blogging platforms before settling to Tumblr in 2010. I was looking for ‘the one’ where I can easily establish a site and use for long. I hopped from Livejournal to Blogger until I found Tumblr.

Tumblr seems to be the best choice at the time. It’s got every feature I need to start a decent blog. I wanted a user-friendly interface where I can publish content without getting bogged down by coding, and Tumblr was perfect.

Tumblr has been a great platform when I needed a playground to showcase my content and my work. In fact, for five years of using it I’m happy with how it works.

As I get more serious with my blogging, that’s when I start noticing how Tumblr seems to get too limiting for me. Every year there’s always something I like to add on my site — a custom page, my own domain, better design and new functionality. As I seek for these upgrades, I begin to realize the things Tumblr can and cannot do.

Don’t get me wrong, Tumblr hasn’t changed and it’s still awesome as it is. It’s my preference that keeps changing, or as I should say, it’s not Tumblr, it’s me.

Then here comes WordPress, an all-new and cool platform in town which almost everyone talks about.

WordPress and I met because they made me try it on some projects I used to work on. I didn’t like it at first because it seems complicated to use. I spent some time learning about it and discovered many awesome things it can do on a site.

I don’t usually go for what’s popular because I am into functionality. Using WordPress for quite some time made me see lots of its functionality features. WordPress has more than what meets the eye and that’s what made me give in.

It took a little while before I decided to move my site to WordPress. I wanted to make sure I was making the right decision. I thought of all aspects considering the hassle of moving everything and starting from scratch. I realized that if I am to bring my blog to the next level, I’ve to take risks. So I did and here I am. I’m happy how my new site looks now and everything seems to be working fine.

I didn’t switch to WordPress just to make my site look better. Tumblr can do that. I switched because of the many other reasons and benefits of a self-hosted WordPress site.

To be clear, here’s a list of reasons why I decided to move to a self-hosted WordPress site:

Full Control

I want to establish a site on my own hosting account. This way, I can back up my content so I never have to worry of losing anything.

Domain Name and Links

I’ve been using the domain www.earlehatsumy.com to my Tumblr site but since it’s hosted in Tumblr, the posts links appear like this: www.earlehatsumy.com/post/123456/title-of-post. A self hosted WordPress site has the feature to personalize the link of each posts so they appear neat:
www.earlehatsumy.com/title-of-post.

Customizing and Flexibility

I get to customize my site however I want with themes and plugins. WordPress has a lot of useful plugins to make a site look better and functional such as security and backup plugins. (I might make a future blog entry of some plugins I used for my site.)

SEO

WordPress works better for SEO. It won’t seem important for starters but businesses and some professional bloggers understand its benefit. Tumblr works like a social media but gives less SEO value.

I don’t regret choosing a self-hosted WordPress site because I was able to come up with such an amazing output. Sure it wasn’t free and definitely not cheap, but having my specific blogging needs in one platform is worth it.

As far as Tumblr, I won’t deny that it was sad moving away from an awesome community. However, I’m not really saying goodbye to it at all. I am keeping a new Tumblr site which will contain some excerpts from this blog and some reblogs as well (Yes, I’m finally reblogging). For Tumblr users who are reading this, comment your blog URL below so I can follow you. 🙂

If you have questions about Tumblr and WordPress, let me know and I’ll try to answer concisely based from my experience of using both.