Previous article: Free Blogging Advice: Migrate blog outside US

As promised, this article is an attempt to show how one can migrate a blog from WordPress to another platform outside the US.

The initial attempt was made with Over Blog.

Summary: The result was not good. I created an account, with great ease. Just entered an email and a password and got a verification email. The email was in French, that was a bit irritating, but I managed to activate the account. But I did not managed to create the blog because of an unknown error.

In more details:

First I created the account with an email and a password.

Problem: Everything is in French. Yes, you can change the language easily in the initial page, but the options to close a pop-up add still appears in French. That is highly irritating.

I managed to go to the page where you create a new account and did exactly that very easily.

Then I got a verification email.

Problem: The email was also only in French. Highly irritating again. Even problematic. I really do not understand why English was not also used in the email, since they advertise that you can create a blog in English (and the page where I created my account was also in English). Anyway, understanding the content of the email was not difficult, so I did easily activate the account.

And then I started creating the blog. I added the mail information (title, domain etc) and selected (or at least, tried to select) the design.

To be honest, it did not seem as if I selected a design. I clicked on many of them (the free ones, not the premium ones) and there was no clear indication that I selected one.

I then clicked Next.

And then I got an error.

That's it.

An error with no more information on what to do. The Help link that you see in the screenshot was not clickable; I had no way of getting out of the wizard steps to set up my site that always ended up in an error I did not know what it was. I could also not click on my profile at the top-right corner because the wizard was in the front.

I will keep trying to resolve.

But for a first try to easily create a blog that was certainly a negative experience.

Last but not least: When I try to connect again and go to the https://connect.over-blog.com/ I see again a French page. I had to use Google translate to understand what it said.

This is really poor user experience in my opinion. If you do not support English, then do not advertise that you support English.

I tried to find a way to contact Over Blog for support. There was no easy way I could detect. From the site I logged in, the Help link, as mentioned already, was not clickable since the wizard for the new blog was in the front and did not let me click on anything else. What is more, the https://manual-en.overblog.com/ site that supposedly contains help, did not contain any support for getting an error when setting up a new blog.

What is more, when I logged in, I was again re-directed to the wizard for setting up the new blog that again always resulted in the unknown error mentioned above. The Help link and the link to my account were in the background and not clickable.

I also tried to ask Gemini AI for help, but without a specific error to mention I was out of luck...

In conclusion: Bad user experience. Seems easy to use, but it does not deliver what it promised. I really want to try this platform and will keep on trying. I wish I had more time to investigate, but the idea is that creating a new blog in 2025 should not be that hard. I will keep on trying and will let you know how it goes. It could have some awesome featured when I get to use it. But in my opinion, such an experience would discourage most of the normal users.

PS. I would happily update this if anyone with experience from Over Blog contacts us to provide support or a hint on what is the problem.