This blog post has been a long time coming. I meant to post it right when I went self-hosted, but….  For whatever reason, that didn’t happen. But here we are now, and I’m ready to share!

I’ve always thought about switching to WP and going self-hosted since I first started My Little Sunshines in June 2014. But of course it costs money, and I didn’t have that. Plus, I was so comfortable with Blogger, as I’ve been using it for about 10 years, that I also didn’t want to be bothered with learning a new platform. But still, the more I read about why bloggers switched, the more I wanted to. However, there was still the issue of money, and I just couldn’t make it work for me. I did buy my own domain though, and thought that was at least a step in the right direction.

Then, when I joined She Teaches Fearlessly, I got a glimpse into the word of WordPress, as that’s the platform STF is on, and I fell in love instantly. The learning curve was small, and it was just so clean, and made such sense. And of course, the STF website is gorgeous and I wanted that for my blog. So what do to? And then I remembered…. Collin. Collin was one of my best friends in high school, and is a computer genius. He is basically self-taught and I’m pretty sure he knows all there is to know about websites, coding, programming, etc. And then I also remembered that he worked for Bluehost and I thought to myself WHY haven’t I thought of asking him if knows about hosting and switching and anything else before?

So, I jumped on facebook messenger and asked if he knew about switching from Blogger to WordPress and if he could help me if he did, once I decided to jump on that ship, and if he recommended Bluehost for hosting and if he could help me with any issues there since that’s where he worked if they ever came up… And basically he pulled through for me in the biggest of ways and set me all up and helped me make the switch and is basically the best friend ever and didn’t ask for a cent. Hashtag true friends.

So thanks to him and his friendship and his computer skills, here I am. And I love it.

I originally tried to get by with using free themes, but eventually found Mai Loves Paris on etsy, grabbed one of her themes, and have really made it my own and I LOVE it. I do still have some things to tweak and update on the design, and I’m in the process of trying to update my older posts as I can, but overall, it’s ready to go. That being said, if you find any broken links or missing pages, etc., PLEASE let me know so I can fix them.

And there you go, a quick look into my journey to self-hosted and WordPress. In the coming months I’ll be sharing tips and tricks for blogging, and some of my favorite things about blogging and using WP, but until then, just hold your horses and look around my beautiful new site. (New about me here, and my collaboration page here.)