I switched to Wordpress in December 2017 having previously been using Squarespace. On checking my admin I realised that I’d never really shared my experience of switching over.
I left Squarespace for a few reasons.
- Slow iOS app development
- Lack of support to edit your design in iOS Safari
- The price
Moving the blog for me was easy, it also gave me a chance to rethink what my blog was about. I’d gotten so caught up in trying to compete with bigger sites I’d lost track of what the purpose of a blog was and stopped enjoying posting.
The first thing I did was look at my existing content and copied anything I wanted to keep into a text file. This took a little while but I’m glad I did it manually.
Now I headed over to Wordpress and created a basic paid hosted account. I’d never had a server so it made sense to use theirs. It also worked out at a quarter of the price I paid at Squarespace. This was a massive win as I’d gotten to the point I was ready to stop blogging.
Now I had my domain etc sorted I got into editing my design. I was delighted to see that the Wordpress site works on iOS Safari just as well as Mac. As iOS is my platform of choice this was a must. I edited it all on my iPad.
When it came to posting I used the Wordpress official app. The only place it’s let down is embedding photo galleries. With Safari if you add multiple images it offers to build a mosaic so it looks nice in your post. On the iOS app you don’t get this option so the images are just inserted one after the other. I’m hoping this gets addressed in a future update.
I took all of my favourite posts that I’d copied into text and created posts on my new blog.
One major thing I’ve noticed compared to Squarespace is that Wordpress appear to be committed to investing in their iOS presence. The app gets frequent updates and whist there are a few niggles (like the photo insert one mentioned) I get the feeling people are working on it. I never got the feeling that Squarespace was invested in iOS at all.
So almost a year in Wordpress and I haven’t looked back!
