Welcome to Podcast Insider.

I'm Mike Dell, the VP of customer relations here at Blueberry.

And I'm Dave Clements, and I'm a sales and support agent here at Blueberry.

So if you're a WordPress user and you're thinking of moving to another web platform, there's some things you should know before you make the move.

Yeah.

Especially if you're using PowerPress.

Yes.

And especially when it comes to your podcast.

Right.

You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochran, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting.

With all the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting, welcome.

Let's dive in.

So we get calls, texts, phones, emails, panic Facebook posts, and all kinds of things where, we'll get some variation of this this sentence.

My web designer moved my website from WordPress to, you know, Wix, Squarespace, Kajabi, you know, you name it, whatever web platform, and now my feed doesn't work.

Well, in this episode, we're gonna try to explain what you need to do before somebody makes that move and maybe talk you out of it.

Today, I got Dave here, because Dave and I are the ones that, have to take those calls, and, maybe this will help some of you if you get a web designer or, you you yourself wanna switch platforms.

It's not impossible, not the worst thing in the world, but there's a few things you must do before the move.

The first thing is, you have to kinda understand how your RSS feed works now with PowerPress and your website, your website is your podcast platform.

It does dual duty.

So not only is it a website, but it also helps distribute or does distribute.

It's not really a help, is it, Dave?

No.

No.

It actually does it.

It it is, it is the home for your podcast.

Yeah.

And it, you know, that feed that's generated from your WordPress site with PowerPress helping it along, that's how Apple, Spotify, all your listeners, all, you know, all the other places get your show.

And if you delete that website or move it to a platform that does not support creating an RSS feed.

And, you know, some some sites do.

I guess Squarespace does and Kajabi does.

They don't do as good a job as Blueberry.

You know, we have all the extra bits, you know, like podcast two point o stuff and and all that.

And, plus, we keep it up to date.

You know?

There are still platforms out there that don't have all the categories Apple uses.

Yeah.

Or they have the old version of Apple's categories from, like, seven years ago.

So but, yeah, if you if you if you kill the website that your your podcast lives on, you're killing your podcast.

So we're gonna try and help you avoid that.

Yeah.

We, we, Todd calls that the extinction event.

It's usually not that bad depending on how you were set up before, but, you know, until you, get that feedback or get a feedback and get a way to redirect it, it's not coming back.

So, David, what are the two ways people can preserve their feed?

The first way is just to keep your WordPress site running, and that's just to keep the feed active.

And then you can just have your new website that lives on that new platform.

And then the other way is to just move your feed to a feed host by Blueberry.

That's pretty simple, I think, because we have a feed that you can use.

You're you're essentially redirecting your feed.

That's what we call it.

A lot of people may not understand what that means, but basically telling all of the podcast apps, hey.

Stop looking at yoursite.com, and now look at this feed coming from Blueberry.

And that's for people that are hosting on Blueberry already.

If you're hosting somewhere else, then you you you need to recreate that feed somehow, somewhere prior to leaving the WordPress site.

It's worse when we get to call it, my website is already gone and, you know, uh-oh.

What do I do?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, you know, it's just one of those things, you know, that, web designers, they're wonderful at making your website look good or at least a good one is, but they're not so good at podcasting.

So, you know, call somebody, get advice before you make that move.

Yeah.

Another big thing is that you've gotta figure out what you're gonna do with your media files.

A lot of WordPress users, initially, I was one of these people, will host the media files on the same server as their website.

We don't recommend that because you can you can cause issues with your your website host.

They could force you to a private server that's way more expensive.

And really, the best situation is just finding a dedicated site or, you know, company like Blueberry.

We always recommend Blueberry, of course, to move your audio files, to store those files, so that you don't you don't incur big fees.

Or if you're redirecting your feed, you don't have to move your files.

Yeah.

If you're already hosting on Blueberry, the feed that we'll create for you at Blueberry prior to your move from WordPress will already have all your episodes in it.

And if you're not hosting with us, we can import your feed into Blueberry, and, you know, then you'll get a feed that has everything your WordPress site had pretty much.

Like I said, all the features are there.

You know, the only difference is the where where the actual posts go, would be in publisher.

So and and this is another thing.

Yeah.

Now I I don't know how important this is in the in the big scheme of things, but it is somewhat important to maintain your SEO and backlinks.

And, you know, that goes for the website part.

Really not as bad for the podcast part because those lengths will change when the feed changes, and it'll point to the right place.

But, you know, you have to think about that a little bit.

So if you're on Wix, you know, you're not gonna have all the same pages and posts that you have on your WordPress site.

Mhmm.

You know, they're not gonna be the same addresses.

And so, you know, think think about that a bit.

And one of the big things is the embeddable players.

You're gonna have to go you know, if especially if you've got a 100 episodes, you're gonna have to get an embeddable player for each of those 100 episodes on your new site because you don't have PowerPress to add them automatically.

That's always a huge problem when people move from PowerPress because, you know, they they've moved to Wix or Squarespace or something like that.

And, you know, like Mike said, like, you're bringing those you wanna have a a page dedicated to every single episode or a post, I guess.

Yeah.

It is a pain to copy and paste because unless you got a magic way of doing it, there's not an easy way to do it.

It's gonna take you a long time.

And, again, that's another benefit of if you're already using PowerPress and moving to a Blueberry feed or even the other way around, we kind of make that easier for you.

Yeah.

You know, the and the thing is is, you know, with these other kind of sites, a lot of it's a lot more manual.

So, you know, if you want to, say, have a post on your website for a podcast episode, then you come to Blueberry or wherever else you're gonna publish it, publish it, and then grab an embed player and go back to your website, that's that's double publishing.

You know, you're publishing a post on whatever podcast host you're on, and you're publishing another web page post.

Yep.

We do have easier option.

It's not as slick, but there is an easier option, where you have a playlist player that you can embed on a single page on your website at Blueberry Power.

It'll show up to the last 50 episodes, but it's not robust.

It's not good for SEO for your website.

Yeah.

So that's important.

It's definitely something to think about.

But there are a lot of people that I've I've helped move from PowerPress, and that's what I always suggest.

I was like, it's just it's easier and, you know, it may affect your SEO, but in the meantime, that's a good a good way to do it so that people can access a bunch of episodes right on a right on your website with a player.

Yeah.

I've had people where they they move to Wix seems to be the big one people like to move to here lately.

That but, you know, I've had people where, you know, alright.

We'll we'll we'll just skip all the old ones.

So let's say they have 50 episodes or 40 episodes, whatever.

We'll put the embed player on a page for the archives.

Yep.

You know?

And just leave it at that.

And then going forward, if they wanna have individual posts for each episode, again, double posting.

So if you're paying someone to publish your stuff, you're gonna be paying them double.

So Yeah.

It's it's just not, it's just not ideal, I guess, is the right way to put it.

Yeah.

You know?

Again, PowerPress is very powerful in that way, hence the word power press.

Yeah.

You know?

And I've also seen people where they have a really custom front page.

In fact, if you go to blueberry.com, that's a WordPress site.

But that front page is not a WordPress site.

It's a static page.

And so if, you know, if you just want your landing page to look different, leave your WordPress in place, but build a static page that looks the way you want it, and that works as well.

I mean, you know, there's a lot of options, but staying with PowerPress, if that's what you're doing already, is really the best bet.

A lot of this also goes we get these other calls where, I wanna change my domain name.

You know?

Say they change the name of their podcast, and the domain name they're using doesn't really jive with the new name of the podcast, so they get another domain name.

A lot of times, what I tell them is to map the new domain to the old website if you're not changing the whole website.

Just say you're just changing the the domain Yeah.

On a WordPress site.

Just map the second domain to that same website.

Mhmm.

And slowly over time, you can go to Apple and change the feed to the new domain.

You can change you know, and and rather than doing a redirect and all that, and leave both domains on the site.

So people that have old links will get there with the old domain, and people with the with the new links will come to the regular domain.

You know?

It doesn't hurt anything to do that.

I've done that a few times.

In fact, podcast insider, we've done that with this one.

You know, when this was a standalone website, now it's part of the Blueberry website.

As we said, it's WordPress.

You know, we had podcastinsider.com.

Before that, we had your podcast.com, and we just simply mapped the domain, you know, the new domain, podcastinsider.com, to that new site.

Then we ordered the whole thing over to Blueberry, but but preplanning, I guess, is the big thing.

This next thing confuses a lot of people.

You don't have to go everywhere to change the the, feed address with a lot of these places.

Spotify is one of them that you should if you directly submitted to Spotify.

Mhmm.

Or you can just tell us if you submitted through Blueberry, and we'll fix it.

Ain't no big deal.

Yeah.

I just had this conversation with a customer literally right before we started recording.

They were they were moving websites, but they were moving from SoundCloud.

And so Oh, yeah.

She's kind of confused on, well, do I have to go in and manually change to the new blueberry feed?

And I was like, no.

Got this magic thing called a 301 redirect.

Here's how you do it.

And she's like, oh, that's really cool.

Yep.

And so yeah.

And a lot of times that works.

Like, it works for, like, 99.9% of the places out there.

Yep.

But, Spotify, they're goofy.

I've seen it work sometimes, and then other times it doesn't.

So I always I'm like, give it about a a day or two after you've implemented it.

And if you see it on Apple and everywhere else, you should be good, but just double check Spotify if you submitted directly to them.

Or if, like Mike said, through us, we'll change it for you.

And on Apple, you you have to put in the new feed URL, but it's, it's just a checkbox that, you know, Dave Dave and I can do on the Blueberry feed to, turn on that for Apple.

Apple will continue to follow the redirect as long as the redirect is in place, but with SoundCloud, who knows, how long they keep those redirects in place.

And, really, just thirty to sixty days is, is all you really need.

Actually, a couple weeks, for most people.

But, yeah, you just you gotta preplan this stuff.

You know, a lot lot of times, you know, people just don't know, and and why should they?

And that's what we're here for.

Yeah.

And so, like, that's that's a huge piece of advice.

Like, if that's just something that you've considered at all, start building out that plan so that, you're not calling us and going, hey.

This has to be changed by tomorrow because we got this huge launch or this huge change coming.

And we've we've had phone calls like that or tickets, and we're like, well, it's quick, but it's not that quick.

You know?

Like, we can implement those changes.

We can help you do that today, but it may take a couple of days before all platforms pick up all of those changes.

So don't hurt yourself in the process.

Plan ahead.

Yeah.

That's that's the the big thing because so many times, you know, people get way ahead of themselves when they do stuff like that.

We're not judging.

If you wanna move off of WordPress and to some other platform, great.

You know, that's there's no rules in podcasting, but there are best practices.

Yeah.

It goes a lot smoother if Yeah.

You preplan this stuff.

Mhmm.

I wanna add to the plan part.

Make sure that you get the new feed in place and tested and working because, what happens is the new feed has to be completely and utterly ready to go.

Nobody's gonna see that new feed until you do the three zero one redirect.

And once that happens, it's and this is one of the few things in podcasting that's instant.

Instantly, everybody's gonna be looking at that new one.

Yep.

And that and that's, you know, the beauty of the three zero one redirect.

And that's a a simple web process.

So, you know, pretty much, like, what we've had to do after somebody's moved and didn't think about it is we have to figure out how to implement a three zero one redirect on that domain.

So don't get rid of your domain no matter what because we can always spin up a website, throw a domain on it, do the three zero one redirect, and it works the same whether it's on Wix or wherever.

Mhmm.

You know?

We can make that happen.

But most people that move platforms keep the domain on those platforms.

And inside those platforms, there are ways of doing three zero one redirects.

Might not be easy, but it's doable.

Anyway, I think, unless you got anything else, I think this wraps it up.

Yeah.

Sometimes this this stuff feels really complicated even to me, and I do it every day.

Just take your time.

Take your time.

Call us, get in touch, and do some research before you jump in headlong just because you got a designer guy that's like, I prefer to work in this platform because we don't want you to break anything.

Just remember, your podcast feed is what connects you to your subscribers.

Changing your website is fine.

Make sure you have a clear plan.

Keep the feed working and redirect it correctly so you don't lose your audience.

Yeah.

Thanks for listening and staying subscribed if you are or following.

I guess they did change that jargon a couple years ago.

If you do want more information about the show and the things that are going on at Blueberry, go over to podcastinsider.com.

Maybe even jump over to the YouTube channel because I've got videos over there.

Yeah.

Dave's the the new YouTube star.

Catch you next week.

Thanks for joining us.

Come back next week.

And in the meantime, head to podcastinsider.com for more information, to subscribe, share, and read our show notes.

To check out our latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast, visit blueberry.com.

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We couldn't afford the e's.