The New LS.com

welcome to the new LS.com 🤗

I am so happy with my new little space on the world wide web, and really hope you enjoy it, too! Before we dive into this post, I have to give the BIGGEST thank you to Phil and the team at Pipdig for making this new blog possible. After nearly 4 months of searching the internet, reading countless articles & help forums, a gazillion hosting/tech support phone calls to Godaddy + live chats with Squarespace and $200 lost to a local “wordpress expert” that left me with nothing, I honestly was losing all hope at any chance of {successfully} migrating my blog from Squarespace to WordPress. Sorry if this gets a bit lengthy, but I want this post to be helpful and informative for anyone who may be experiencing the same issues that I ran into…

Let’s start by saying, there is nothing simple or easy about migrating your blog and all of its content from Squarespace to WordPress. If you google “how to migrate your blog from Squarespace to WordPress” you will find plenty of articles with a step by step “how to” for using the export function in squarespace which gives you an .xml file with all of your content. Next step would be to use the import function within WordPress. How nice it would be if that actually worked. I was left with nothing but a bunch of errors & “failed to import” messages. Between Squarespace chats/emails & Godaddy hosting/tech support phone calls, I kept hearing these reasons for failed imports…
– there is code/affiliate links inserted in my posts. The code is interfering with the import and I should delete the links to make my .xml file import successfully.
– that I could 1 by 1, copy & paste/recreate my blog posts on my new wordpress site. uhm, no! I didn’t even know I had nearly 900 blog posts. So that definitely was not an option.

Enter, pipdig. I am beyond thankful for finding pipdig. They are a UK based company and specialize in WordPress migrations, particularly from Squarespace and Blogger. After sending an email, I promptly got a response from Phil who turned out to be the one to set up my new blog. I can’t say enough good things about Phil – he was super knowledgeable, professional & responsive. He took care of everything from setting up my hosting, switching my name servers, of course setting up my new wordpress theme, imported all of my content and even submitted my new sitemap to Google. After about 4 days of communicating back and forth via email, voilà, my beautiful new blog was ready!

Before I continue, I actually have to back up a few months to when I initially purchased a beautiful wordpress theme that I fell in love with from an Etsy Shop called 17th Avenue Designs. Kate, who runs the shop started out very responsive, however, once I purchased the theme, I never heard from her again. I sent multiple messages via Etsy and even tried contacting them via their website – nothing – total ghost. A part of their services offered is to help with theme installation + blog migration which I stated that I wanted & needed help with. It really is a shame that they turned out to just totally suck because they have some really beautiful themes. If you check out their reviews on Etsy, you will read a ton of wonderful reviews. I’m not really sure what happened and why the ball was dropped with me, but it really sucks to have winded up having such a bad experience. So, with all that being said, if you happen to be shopping for a wordpress theme and come across this particular Etsy Shop, I wouldn’t be so quick to purchase from them. Luckily, the theme didn’t cost much, however, I wasted so much time installing the theme myself, trying to set it up properly and attempting to migrate my content over myself. Once I realized I was never going to hear from Kate again, I decided it was time to move on.

So why did I move from Squarespace to WordPress in the first place? Well, what’s funny is when I first started blogging in the end of 2013, I actually started on WordPress. In hindsight, I should have never left wordpress. I simply should have just switched themes, because I didn’t like my current one. I had heard from a couple people how they liked Squarespace so I checked them out and really liked the simplicity of their templates. As time went on, I found myself very limited by squarespace for number of reasons and wanting to move back to WordPress.

My blog on Squarespace was pretty much just one long, scrolling white page of posts – there really wasn’t any type of layout or navigation. My template didn’t support a side bar, there was no search function, no archives, no related posts, the list goes on. None of my content was displayed anywhere for my visitors to see. Now, when you visit the blog, you see various blog posts from everything I share : style, travel, healthy living. Its all right here for you to peruse and read. WordPress has so many amazing widgets & plugin’s to continue to improve and customize any blog/website. They seriously are so great and I wish I had never switched platforms to begin with. WordPress also has amazing SEO capabilities, whereas, Squarespace claims to already be SEO’d, however, there is nowhere to add any SEO {Search Engine Optimization} and my traffic suffered greatly after switching and never really recouped.

So, with allll that being said, here I am back on WordPress and I am so happy to be here! 🙌🏼 I hope you love it as much as I do! I am feeling re-inspired to blog! I have a scrolling list of blog post topics that I keep in my notepad to share with you guys and I can’t wait to start creating new content. I was feeling so unmotivated and uninspired to share anything in my old space – it was just so…blah.  As I mentioned earlier, there are nearly 900 posts. {wow} I have been making my way thru each category & blog post to make sure everything is assigned to the proper category and making little tweaks where needed. So if you run into something that has a little bit of the old blog left to it, my signature line, namely, pease bear with me while I get my house in order. 😊

Thanks so much for being here and if there is anything you’d love to see on the pages of LS.com, I’d love for you to leave a comment below or send an email here: LS@laurenschwaiger.com

Much love,
xx