The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress
UPDATED 26 August 2009, with minor updates throughout, and a big change to step 3.
Want a full guide to setting up WordPress on BlueHost, an inexpensive, WordPress-recommended hosting company? Sign up for BlueHost with an affiliate link on this page, and email me (guide at mamablogga.com) for a free PDF guide on installation, set up, WordPress, add-ons and more!
I made the move from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress more than a year and a half ago. At the time, I wrote the original ultimate guide to migrating, but a few things have changed in the intervening months. So I present the fully updated, all new, ultimate guide to migrating from Blogger to WordPress!
Be sure to check out my article on deciding and preparing to switch your domain. Once you’re sure you’re ready, then here are 10 steps to transferring your blog safely, completely and . . . well, awesomely. This method preserves your links, your subscribers, your comments and your content, and makes the move search engine safe.
Get the goods: a domain, hosting, and the WordPress software
1. Get a domain, preferably “yourblog.com.” Don’t own a domain? I use either GoDaddy or Bluehost for domain registration. Their prices are okay. I recommend three things here:
- Get private domain registration. No junk mail, no strangers getting your address from your whois info.
- If available, get yourblog.com , yourblog.net and yourblog.org. Sometimes GoDaddy offers a deal where you can get free private registration when you register 3 domains. (Then redirect .org and .net to the .com using account management. Select 301 redirects.)
- If you go with GoDaddy, search for “GoDaddy coupon.” Click on the first result and use whichever coupon will save you the most money (calculate out the % to see which one that is if you have to).
2. Get hosting. I recommend Bluehost.com; they came highly recommended and are a pretty good deal. Also, they’re one of WordPress’s recommended hosts and feature a very simple install for WordPress.
UPDATED 3. Install WordPress. With Bluehost, just login to your control panel, click on Fantastico under Addons/Plugins Simple Scripts under Software/Services, select WordPress from the list, and click the green Install Now button (under Install on an existing server—even if you’re importing your old blog, you’ll be using a new installation of WordPress). Fill in the forms and you’re done. If your host doesn’t have a similar install, you’ll have to install manually. It shouldn’t be too hard; WordPress gives you instructions (and they claim it takes five minutes!).
Prepare to transfer your feed: you don’t have to lose any subscribers
4. Blogger enables you to transfer your subscribers seamlessly as well. If you haven’t already, sign up for a FeedBurner account (if you need a walkthrough to FeedBurner, check it).
Then, login to Blogger and go to Settings > Site Feed. In the Post Feed Redirect URL box, enter your new FeedBurner address. This will help redirect your subscribers.
Prepare your new WordPress blog: with some fun stuff
5. Login to your WordPress (might take a little time for the installation to “take”). Select “Options” then “Permalinks.” Select “Custom” and type this line in the box:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
This is to match the post structure of your Blogger blog, to minimize the number of broken links and redirects. (It’s possible to change this structure, too, of course, but it’ll take additional steps.)
Wendy Piersall has a few more steps to setting up your initial WordPress installation and getting it off the ground. All good steps!
Move your posts and comments
6. This is the easy part! In WordPress, go to Manage (Tools in WP 2.7+) > Import. Select Blogger from the list and enter your login information. This should automatically transfer all your posts and comments for you. 
However, some of your links won’t work anymore because Blogger and WordPress convert post titles into URLs differently—Blogger leaves out stop words like “and” and “the.” You can fix this, too, with another handy plugin, Redirection. Upload it, activate it and you can use it to easily track and redirect individual broken links (for example, from “/this-best-post-ever.html” to “/and-this-is-the-best-post-ever.html”).
There are also some other plugins to do this automatically. To get these (or any) plugins, in WordPress go to Plugins>Add New. Search for the plugins by name or related terms. (Searching for “blogger permalinks” brings up some plugins that can help with this and some of the other technical stuff.)
Transfer your feed: keep all your subscribers
7. Login to FeedBurner, go into the feed and click on “Edit Feed Details.” Change your Original Feed to http://YOURNEWURL.com/feed/ .
8. In WordPress, you’ll probably want to use FeedBurner as well, and if so, there’s another plugin to integrate the two services perfectly, FeedSmith, owned by FeedBurner (which is owned by Google).
Change over the URL: the final steps to move your blog
9. Back in Blogger, select Settings for the blog you want to transfer. Select Publishing. Click the top link, “Custom domain.” Type in your new domain, www.yourblog.com. Save. Now your links will transfer automatically to your own domain (though sometimes Blogger will show visitors a page to make sure they’re not being taken to a different site accidentally), but you’ll need one more step to transfer your blog home page over.
10. Still in Blogger, go to Layout>Edit HTML. Place the following code anywhere after <head>:
<meta content='0; url=http://YOURNEWURL.com/' http-equiv='refresh'/>
This sends visitors to your blog homepage directly to your new URL, and, as Sebastian’s Pamphlets says, is a search-engine safe method of redirection.
Like the change in step 9, this can show visitors a warning page that they’re being taken to another domain. Some might think that it’s just as good to put a link to your new URL in your old blog and leave it up. However, it’s better for your search engine rankings to transfer it like this—if search engines see two copies of your content around the Internet, they may try to penalize one or both of your sites for “duplicate content.”
Be sure to test your main blog URL as well as some of your old post URLs to make sure everything is working, and of course, be subscribed to your feed to make sure that’s in order as well.
And you’re ready to blog on wit’ yo’ bad self.
Note: You might have to import your images to WordPress as well, but I haven’t.
Want a full guide to setting up WordPress on BlueHost, an inexpensive, WordPress-recommended hosting company? Sign up for BlueHost with an affiliate link on this page, and email me (guide at mamablogga.com ) for a free PDF guide on installation, set up, WordPress, add-ons and more! (Note: you must sign up with an affiliate link to receive the guide.)
Disclosure: the GoDaddy and Bluehost link is an affiliate link.
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[...] learned so much from Jordan at MamaBlogga about the ins and outs of blogging! She recently wrote The New Ultimate Guide To Migrating From Blogger To WordPress, and I’d recommend anyone who’s thinking about switching check it [...]
November 22nd, 2008 at 9:51 amthis is one of the best explained steps to not only migrate old blogger accounts to wordpress, but for those new to the world of blogging on a domain they control. keep up the great work!
November 26th, 2008 at 8:24 amDo you happen to know if you purchased a custom domain on the Blogger page if you can take that with you to WordPress? I’m thinking about using WordPress instead of Blogger but I would hate to give up my domain name.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:28 amMy first impression is that you should be able to keep the domain. When you register a domain through Blogger, you’re actually using one of Google’s partners, GoDaddy (or possibly eNom). If you had to register with GoDaddy when you purchased your domain, you can sign in to GoDaddy with that information and change the nameservers easily.
If you didn’t register with GoDaddy, you will either have some DNS control within Google or you’ll have to write Google to have them unlock your domain so you can transfer it to another registrar (you can transfer it to your host, like BlueHost, too).
Does that make sense?
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:53 amMakes perfect sense, thank you. Are there any major benefits to move from Blogger to WordPress? My main reason for wanting to make the move is because the templates on WordPress seem a lot nicer.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:00 pmYou can find some pretty nice templates for Blogger, and you can hire out custom work pretty cheaply for either platform.
Here’s why I love WordPress, and I think the first point is really key: self-hosted WordPress can be made to do just about anything (through plugins or other customization). Blogger’s customization features are getting better, but they’re still behind WP’s.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:04 pmthis is amazing!!!!!
December 12th, 2008 at 1:55 amit was the coolest, easiest transition ever! thanks so much!
I do have a quick question… blogger won’t allow me to use timtabstudios.com/blog as a valid domain to foward my visitors to… do you know any way around it? blogger is just fowarding people to my site instead of my blog. Check it out http://www.timtabstudios.blogspot.com
a little more help would be greatly appreciated…
thanks
tim tab
@Tim—One option (though less than ideal) would be to use an intermediate redirect–have Blogger redirect to blog.timtabstudios.com and then redirect blog.timtabstudios.com to timtabstudios.com/blog . It’ll work okay for your visitors, but it might be a little messy.
December 12th, 2008 at 9:30 amGot my blogger blog all moved over to WP thanks to your help. I so appreciate your efforts on this. I probably wouldn’t have been successful so easily or quickly without you.
January 31st, 2009 at 8:57 pm[...] few articles online about how to get started with a WordPress blog. Mainly, I found everything at The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress (since my original plan was simply to move over and continue my personal blog) and A WordPress [...]
April 20th, 2009 at 7:35 pmAwesome!
A couple key questions given my situation and your expert opinion would be wonderful (very impressed with your site!). I recently started a new WP blog darwinsfinance.com and the results have been astounding. Search traffic coming in on day 1 and hit PR3 at first update. So much better than blogger and I’m not looking back. However, Everydayfinance is my initial blog and for now, I’ve kept both going. What I’d like to do is keep Everydayfinance (blogger platform) active since there’s still steady traffic and advertising commitments, but I want all the old content, comments, etc. to appear at a new WP-hosted blog and I’ll add from there (so yes, I’ll now be at 3 blogs, but each with a different focus and the blogger one will become legacy/low priority). Here are my questions:
1) If I leave the blogger blog active, but want to transfer all my content to a new one (Let’s call it BLOG-COPY), will BLOG-COPY be penalized for duplicate content in search rankings in the future?
2) Would BLOG-COPY have all the internal links that used to exist at everydayfinance pointing back to everydayfinance or will the steps you outlined now force the internal links to redirect into BLOG-COPY?
3) Once I get some new incoming links and establish authority, will Google search start to pick up traffic from content in my old posts? The reason I ask is that with the improved permalink structure and SEO plugins I can use with WP, I envision I could get mass traffic from my old content, if only I had it right in WP.
4) Can you outline what steps I should skip or alter from your post above if I want to follow this method of leaving the old blog active and just transfer the content/comments to a new blog? For instance, I don’t want to redirect from my old blog to BLOG-COPY automatically, need to keep the old one active.
5) On your permalink recommendation, I’m concerned about the long term permalink structure – best to start with postname as you know. Can I just structure it that way and let old external links coming in still go to my old blogger blog, but new posts I make will have the pretty permalink structure? Or do you recommend following your step above and then switching the permalink structure once the transition is complete? Sorry if I didn’t frame right, but I think you’ll get the gist.
Lots of questions; hopefully you can help me and all the other struggling Bloggers out there looking to take the leap!
April 24th, 2009 at 12:49 pm1.) Probably. Possibly. If the search engines feel like it.
2.) Links will redirect to BLOG-COPY.
3.) On BLOG-COPY? Links are going to be most important, then on-page factors like title and content. Permalinks (and by this I assume you’re referring to using keywords in the URL) probably aren’t going to make or break your Google ranking. They may make a slight difference, but it’s probably not going to vault you onto the first page of Google where you’re normally on page 10. So not redirecting your old links is going to cripple BLOG-COPY.
4.) All right, here’s what I would probably do to try to avoid the duplicate content penalty: don’t do the custom domain or the meta refresh listed above. Use the WP import function above to get posts and comments onto BLOG-COPY. In Blogger, go to Settings>Let search engines find your blog and select no to keep your blog out of search engines. Unfortunately, your links would still only point to the old posts this way.
5.) The permalink structure outlined here is designed to make sure your existing links don’t break. If you don’t care about existing links going on to your new blog, then you can do whatever you want. (I would still block search engines from your old blog to avoid dup content, or consider the new canonical URL tag.) It’s probably not going to significantly impact your SEO if you have the year and month in there, though it may date your content. Once you’ve set it, don’t change the permalink structure unless you have something in place to redirect it (like the Redirection plugin from Urban Giraffe; can’t remember if this is automatic with WP with these days, but it might be).
April 24th, 2009 at 4:03 pm[...] The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress @mamablogga.com [...]
May 22nd, 2009 at 10:05 amThis is amazing…
I think mentally I am making it harder than it is. Well, actually I have lost patience for computer stuff since having the kids!!!
Can you use WP to blog from your mobile (ie: Blackberry)?
May 28th, 2009 at 3:08 pm@Jennifer—I think so. If your mobile browser can load PHP, it should work.
Alternatively, you can set up WP (or Blogger) to accept email posts.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:25 pmI have my own domain hosted by blogger. I want to switch to wordpress, the thesis theme, and a hosting service.
I’m afraid though that I will lose my photos or that they will not make the transfer to wordpress. I have thousands of photos and it would be a real pain to have to upload them all again to wordpress.
Also when I create the wordpress blog do I immdiately add the thesis theme before importing or after?
I wish I would have gone with wordpress in the beginning.
thanks!
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:31 pmI’ve never had to transfer my photos on my old posts; they’re still hosted on Picasa/Blogger.
It doesn’t make a difference whether your install the theme or import the blog first, but I’d install the theme first.
Good luck!
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:31 amVery informative post. I managed to migrate my blog from blogger to WP successfully, but had one problem.. The WP import tool did not import the “Comment_author_email” and “comment_author_url” fields for the comments. Is there any way I can get the info from blogger to WP.
June 9th, 2009 at 12:54 pmNow, it’s been a while, but my experience was that you had to enter those fields manually, especially since Blogger doesn’t store those in its comments. Even if the importer did try to take that info from your Blogger comments, it would only link to the comment authors’ Blogger profiles (unless, of course, they went to the trouble of using the Name/URL option when making their comments).
There’s no way to get those email addresses (unless the comment authors have them on their Blogger profiles). If you want their blog URLs, you’ll have to go through and find them manually via their profiles, unfortunately.
June 9th, 2009 at 1:14 pmThanks Jordan! Not what I wanted to hear tho
June 9th, 2009 at 1:22 pmBe careful about migrating from blogger to wordpress because the process will *not* import your images. Those are still hosted on blogger. And I have been told, although I am far from being ready or brave enough to test this, that if you delete your blogger blog, you’ll lose all your photos. If you don’t delete it, you well may have a dupe content problem. So, the images thing is something to figure out.
BTW, this is a great guide to an unintuitive process. Thanks!
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:50 amThanks, Blake. The article does note that WP doesn’t import your photos automatically. I’ve never had a problem with using the img srcs from Blogger since my import.
I don’t recommend you delete your Blogger blog or keep it the way it was, but use the custom domain feature in Blogger to redirect to new posts. This eliminates both problems you point out—it keeps the images and doesn’t trigger search engines’ duplicate content filters.
HTH!
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:21 pmHi,
Just wanted to stop by and let you know that this proved to be a valuable resource for the exercise I’ve just carried out; combining four Blogger/Blogspot blogs into a single WordPress blog.
Not everything was relevant, as I wasn’t doing a straight one for one migration, but your tutorial was far more helpful than anything else I came across.
Thanks again.
“Maskil”
June 29th, 2009 at 11:59 am@Russell—Glad to hear it! Happy to help and best of luck!
June 29th, 2009 at 12:42 pmHi there. A friend turned me on to this post as I’m about to migrate myself. However I see nothing mentioned about the backlinks and SEO being successfully transferred if you move from blogger to WP in this manner. Am I right to assume I will lose all backlinks and PR that I’ve accumulated with my blogger blog? And if so, how can I manage to keep my backlinks with a move? I know it involves a 301 redirect, but I am kinda newbish and have no idea what that involves, and if the 301 redirect can be used with this migration method.
By the way, this is easily the best and most well laid out method I’ve seen for moving my blog, and I’ve been searching forever! So thank you!
August 6th, 2009 at 6:57 pm@Peter—No, you’re not right to assume you’ll lose backlinks and PageRank. Actually, that’s exactly what a 301 redirect is for—it keeps your links intact and transfers the authority your blog has accumulated. A lot of this is explained more in depth in Safely move your blog.
Blogger has now added an interstitial page when someone clicks on the link to warn them that the domain has moved, but other than that, everything should transfer pretty smoothly, though there might be a few glitches with stop words (when creating the URL for a post, Blogger leaves out ‘to’ automatically and WP doesn’t, for example) and too-long URLs (Blogger cuts off the URL in a post a lot shorter than WP does).
Glad to help!
August 6th, 2009 at 7:21 pm[...] Need advise from a blog expert… Paulo, it is pretty easy to do. The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress | MamaBlogga Not my site but she shows in easy steps how to do it. Real easy to do and FREE. Don’t pay for it. [...]
August 20th, 2009 at 2:01 pm[...] blogs, add-ons and more! (If you’re planning to import another blog, also check out my search-engine friendly guide to migrating from Blogger to WordPress to make your switch safe and [...]
August 27th, 2009 at 3:15 pmGreat guide, this might come in handy for me in the near future!
October 7th, 2009 at 11:06 pmI just wanted to say thanks for this post. I migrated from Blogger two days ago, and this blog was integral to my success. I’ve run into some problems with “Redirection,” so I had to manually update my permalinks, but that didn’t take too long, and I’m not fully moved to the new space.
Thanks for the help!
October 9th, 2009 at 12:05 amHi there. Me again
Just wondering if it’s possible to move a blogger blog like this to a wordpress site that I already have up and running, or if I must do this to only a fresh install?
I ask because funnily enough I was too intimidated with trying this before reading your advice, so I just simply began another wordpress blog with the same topic and it is now ranking around the same position as my blogger. I hope to be able to combine the two, but I don’t want this to cause any issues in my ranking for either.
October 9th, 2009 at 6:37 am@Beej—Happy to help!
@Peter—Yes, you can import to an existing WordPress installation. You’ll just want to make sure you have the permalinks turned on. Good luck!
October 9th, 2009 at 8:14 amThank you so much for all of this fabulous info! I’m having a problem with my permalinks and am wondering if you might have an answer. I used the custom format (/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html) that you gave and some of my posts in WP are now different than they are in blogger. In blogger some of my posts with longer titles are shorter in the permalink, whereas WP is using all of the words. Do you know a way to fix this without going in and fixing each one manually?
October 31st, 2009 at 10:03 amI believe there is a way to do this—if you wanted to learn Apache and manually edit your .htaccess file. (I did this when I changed over to strip out the year and month info, but it took a long time to learn and can be pretty scary—you can mess up your site pretty bad if you do it wrong.) You can try that, or it might actually be easier and faster just to fix the post titles by hand.
October 31st, 2009 at 10:34 amThanks so much for this guide! I recently migrated from Blogger to Wordpress and this post was an invaluable resource. I gave you a shout-out.
November 4th, 2009 at 9:43 pm[...] just probably a lot smarter and more patient than me. The most helpful site I found was the “New Ultimate Guide“, randomly, on MamaBlogga.com (who would have guessed that a site based on “a [...]
November 4th, 2009 at 9:47 pmYesterday I migrated my blog from Blogger to WordPress. I used your post here as my primary guide. It is incredibly useful and helpful. I’ve also given you a “thanks” on my blog and also writing to you here to say THANKS!
My one problem is that when I migrated everything over, the posts all came, links seem okay, and most if not all of the photos also came. But none of the comments! Anyone have any tips on that?
November 18th, 2009 at 4:57 pm[...] This blog post has been incredibly helpful in the migration. [...]
November 18th, 2009 at 5:04 pm@Spike—I’m glad it worked for you!
I’m not sure what happened to your comments; I haven’t heard of this problem before. Did you have them through another service, like Haloscan?
November 18th, 2009 at 10:33 pmNo I hadn’t done anything like Haloscan or anything else non-standard with the comments. The program runs, I see the progress line, all the posts come over, comments transferred remains at 0 and it’s done. I’ve asked a friend of mine to poke through Wordpress support forums and he says he’s seen messages from others who had problems importing comments but no solutions.
November 19th, 2009 at 2:42 amStep 2: Why do I need a domain name AND hosting? What is hosting? Do I already have it if I got my google name through google apps (and godaddy)?
Step 3: Where do I need to/how do I install Wordpress using google apps site manager
I have a blogger blog, and a wordpress account and my own domain name on godaddy via googleapps (but I haven’t connected the three yet). I’d like to migrate my blogger blog exactly as is over to wordpress (keeping the same template, layout, images, posts, etc) while simultaneously putting the new wordpress blog on my new domain. It seems like this tutorial is how to do just that, but I’m still confused about the things I mentioned above,and about some other stuff (like importing my subscribers) but I think if I figure out those two main things, the rest should come easy.
November 26th, 2009 at 2:30 pmSorry about the delay in responding, Julia, I was offline for the holiday (and then really sick).
You need a domain name so people can point their browsers to your site; you need hosting to store the files so that people can see them when they access your domain. You definitely already have a domain name if you got a domain name (yourdomain.com) through GoDaddy and Google. As far as I know, Google doesn’t offer hosting, though they do offer limited services with Google Sites.
Although I’ve used Google Apps, I’m not sure what you mean by Google Apps site manager. Are you using Google Sites? If so, then you can’t use WordPress there. Are you using Google Apps for Your Domain? That also won’t let you run WordPress.
Keeping the exact same template and layout can be challenging in the change because the two platforms are so different. It will take some coding experience to create the exact same layout.
However, you should be able to import the rest of the content from both blogs onto a domain once you have a hosting package that will let you use WordPress. (I recommend BlueHost.)
December 2nd, 2009 at 9:22 amThanks for this helpful post. Is it possible to transfer your comments if you’ve been using haloscan, not the blogger comment format?
December 5th, 2009 at 12:02 pmApparently it’s a little challenging, but you might try this: http://justinsomnia.org/2007/11/importing-haloscan-comments-into-wordpress-23-from-blogger/
Good luck!
December 5th, 2009 at 3:39 pmthanks! Very appreciated. Not sure I’m up for it though. Haloscan may have anchored me to blogger.
December 5th, 2009 at 3:48 pmExcellent tutorial, I just completed the migration. It worked without a glitch. Thank you!
December 27th, 2009 at 11:12 pm[...] followed MamaBlogga’s tutorial. It worked without a glitch. This entry was posted in blog style and tagged blog migration, [...]
December 28th, 2009 at 8:15 amHi, I am using Blogger since Sep 2008 and my blog has been redirected to own domain .com on July 2009. I just signed up GoDaddy hosting and planning to migrate my Blogger blog to WP with own hosting.
I purchased the .com domain from Godaddy via Blogger and the Domain Setting via Google Apps but I signed up Godaddy hosting using another login username, is there any problem for migrating my .com blogger blog to WP in own hosting by changing the “servername” in the domain to Godaddy hosting? Where can I find the Godaddy hosting’s servername?
Can u guide me what should I do first because this is the first time I have an own hosting? I tried to follow your instructions above but I actually stuck at the first step. Do I need to change the “servername first” or add existing .com domain name to hosting first or install WP first…?
How to install WP in Godaddy hosting, any idea? I can’t see the “control panel” in my hosting, where to find?…so many questions and so sorry because I’m totally new, I don’t know how to start, please help! Thanks so much.
January 5th, 2010 at 9:42 pmYou’ll probably want to contact GoDaddy to merge your two accounts (I did that; it’s very easy). You’ve already got the nameservers set to Google to show your Blogger blog, so you may have to switch that off, unless they want to do it automatically to switch to your GoDaddy hosting.
GoDaddy Help has an article on how to set up WordPress: http://help.godaddy.com/article/834 .
January 5th, 2010 at 10:13 pmHi Jordan, thanks for replying me. I’ve done the setup followed your link to Godaddy’s help page and installed the WP as well. Now will try to migrate my blogger blog to WP follow your instructions in this post. Hope I don’t face any problem to migrate
Thanks so much!
January 8th, 2010 at 5:45 amHi Jordon, I faced another problem: My blog holidays-in-bali.blogspot.com was redirected to own domain bali-holidays.info earlier. Now when I go to WP tool – import and access to my Blogger account, the site bali-holidays.info shows no post 0/0 but there are actually around 20 posts there, so I can’t import anything, how should I do now? Appreciate your help. Thanks so much!
January 8th, 2010 at 7:18 amDid you resolve this? I checked your site and it looks like you got the posts imported just fine. If not, then, if I remember correctly, you may have to switch off the custom domain in Blogger to import the posts, then turn it back on once the posts are in place.
January 8th, 2010 at 8:58 amThanks for the tutorial…I’m still on edge as to wanting to change or not.
I’m curious, are all of the steps still the same if I already have my own custom domain and already use that custom domain on blogger (www.reallyareyouserious.blogspot.com goes to http://www.reallyareyouserious.com)?
January 8th, 2010 at 8:18 pmKrystyn—I know I’ve dealt with that before, but I’m trying to remember how we resolved it. I think (as I said in the comment above) that we switched the blogspot blog back to a blogspot address before we changed the nameservers on the domain, and then picked up at step 3. Then you’ll want to switch the custom domain back on later in the process.
January 8th, 2010 at 8:37 pmHi Jordon, I have solved the earlier problem by exporting blogger xml file of my blogspot blog and converted it to WXR format, then import the file to WP. Everything works well. Now I want to migrate my largest blog, it has around 2000 posts and the export xml file is around 11MB, which is very large. My problem now is I can’t even convert the xml file to WXR for WP coz the “converter” only allowed file below 1MB. Also heard that WP not allowed us to import(upload) large file, is it true? In this case, how to migrate large blog (11MB) from Blogger to WP? Any idea and advice? Thanks.
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:18 amYes, there’s an upload limit of 2MB on WordPress (for most files; imports may be a different story).
If the problem is the same as before, I’d recommend switching off your custom domain on Blogger (going back to a blogspot address), then using the import tool on WordPress to see if that works.
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:25 amHi, Jordon, before I can try your suggestion, I face another problem: my blogger blog is using own domain, I’ve added the domain to my hosting and installed WP, also changed the nameservers to my hosting’s default setting. I also deleted all the previous default DNS setting(Google) in my domain. Now when I entered my domain url, it shows “broken link” page instead of a “welcome” page in WP. I found something weird also, when I entered my domain url with www (http://www.funkydowntown.com), there is a Blogger favicon (orange B) in the address bar but for url without www (http://funkydowntown.com), there is no Blogger favicon. Why can this (Blogger favicon) happens? The Blogger favicon should not appear anymore, right? Normally it takes how long to show up the welcom page in WP for old domain just changed the nameservers? My previous one domain for another blog took me about 3-4 hours to get the WP page, this time is longer time to wait. I’m afraid I have something not done yet in the process to add the old domain to own hosting and change nameservers, hope to hear from you. I will still trying to find whether I miss out any part while waiting your reply…thanks!
January 23rd, 2010 at 5:37 amThe favicon is just something your computer brings up from its cache. They’re notoriously slow to change. It doesn’t appear on my computer (and the non-www version redirects to the www version automatically when I try it, though neither work).
My only guess here would be if you installed WP in a folder (http://www.funkydowntown.com/wordpress). DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to take effect.
Beyond that, I’m sorry, I just can’t tell from here what’s causing this problem. If your domain and your hosting are from GoDaddy, they’re probably better equipped to troubleshoot here.
Sorry I’m not more help.
January 23rd, 2010 at 1:46 pmHi, Jordan, it’s fine if you can’t help on this issue, you’d provided me many useful tips, you are better than Godaddy, they replied me with not relevant answer
I would like to ask some general questions:
1. Normally it takes how long to wait after nameservers changed(pointing) to another servers? 24 hours, 48 or 72 hours?
2. Is the broken link page you saw http://funkydowntown.com (with or without www) consider a “normal” page while waiting for propagation?
3. Another question, do I need to input the server IP address in my domain setting, anyway I didn’t do that for my earlier migration, just wondering?
Thanks Jordan, looks like I have to sit tighly & cross my fingers to hope the site will be visible within 48 hours, which I assumed this is a “normal” waiting period. Thanks Bro for your reply and nice to “meet” you here
January 23rd, 2010 at 7:39 pmHave you tried live chat for customer support? They’ve always been pretty helpful to me.
1. The max should be 72 hours.
2. I don’t really know what’s happening behind the scenes; I was redirected to my ISP’s search page, as I am for sites it doesn’t think exists.
3. No, you shouldn’t have to input the IP address. The DNS is designed to automatically direct to the IP.
(You’re welcome, but I’m a “she.” The “Mama” thing, and all.)
January 23rd, 2010 at 8:15 pm[...] mamablogga.com – The ultimate guide to migrating from blogger to wordpress [...]
January 26th, 2010 at 6:22 pmI have a blogger blog that I’m thinking about exporting to Wordpress. Now, I already got a custom domain through Blogger complete with the Google Apps account. How would the transfer process be different given this factor?
January 28th, 2010 at 8:52 am@Shaun—It kind of depends. To continue using Google Apps, it looks like you’d have to set up your blog on wordpress.com (as opposed to using self-hosted WordPress.org) and import your posts through their import function, then redirect your domain to your wordpress.com domain. Then to make sure that works, according to a page on the WP forum, you should:
1) Log into your google account through the Webmaster Tools Page.
2) Add your site
3) Go to the Statistics tab and click on the link that says verify.
4)In the web master tools section select “Upload an HTML file” as your method of verification.
5) Create a new page (not a post) and use the code they give you as the title. Example of the code:
google4f645e3adsdaa48g3a41z.html
6) Click to publish it.
7) Ask Google to verify your Blog.
If you want self-hosted WordPress (a lot more customizable), you’ll want to look for a full hosting account. WordPress (and I) recommends BlueHost (aff). It’s <$10/month.
January 28th, 2010 at 9:30 amAmazing information! I was very nervous about trying to make the change but it was so easy following your directions! I now have your blog saved to my favorites and I will be following! Keep up the great work!
January 30th, 2010 at 5:47 pm[...] frankly if I’d had to do that, I’d rather switch to WordPress and maintain control over the hosting. Not that I don’t like Blogger, but because there is so [...]
January 31st, 2010 at 11:19 amThx for this great tutorial! I followed your instructions & now Im up & running on Wordpress.
February 4th, 2010 at 10:17 pm[...] to make the Blogspot jump yourself–and it’s highly recommended–check out this useful guide as a jumping-off point. Officially, we used a meta redirect, but what really got this site pumping [...]
February 5th, 2010 at 1:25 am@Tafari—That’s great! So glad it went smoothly!
February 5th, 2010 at 10:12 amThis is a great tutorial but I am stuck on the importing posts and comments stage. At a certain point 1/294 posts and 394/4000 comments, it stops and the button changes from “importing” to “set authors”. Any chance you know the fix for this??
February 6th, 2010 at 7:33 am@Mardi— :\ I’ve heard of a couple reports of problems with the importer—I think it’s a problem with WordPress.
Searching the WordPress Support Forums, I see many people having the same problem ( http://wordpress.org/search/import+blogger?forums=1 ). There are some code patches suggested, as well as trying to import your blog to a WordPress.com blog, and then importing your WordPress.com blog to your WordPress.org blog (and deleting the WP.com version).
Hope that helps!
February 6th, 2010 at 10:03 amGreat tutorial – transition was pain less and I have planned to link to this tutorial from my blog as a way fo saying thank you. Only thing which didn’t happen was that comments did not come across. Is there any way of getting the comments to come across too?
February 12th, 2010 at 5:29 am@Sam—Thanks! I’m glad it worked well (mostly). A couple other people have mentioned problems transferring comments and it may be a persistent problem. I’ve heard that you could re-try the import, and WP should skip or delete any duplicate posts, but beyond that I don’t think the problem has been resolved. You could check out the WordPress Support Forums to see if they’ve resolved this or found a workaround yet: http://wordpress.org/support/ Good luck!
February 12th, 2010 at 11:34 am[...] quick search turned up these highly-recommended instructions on migrating to Wordpress from Blogger, and in fact Blogger importing is part of the standard [...]
February 18th, 2010 at 12:47 am[...] – How to Back Up your Blogspot Blog – How to Recover Your Deleted Blog – Transferring from Blogger to Wordpress [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 1:49 pmWhen you set a “Custom domain” in “Publishing” settings on Blogger, it will show
February 21st, 2010 at 8:48 amWhen you set a “Custom domain” in “Publishing” settings on Blogger, it will show a redirection warning for all pages, including the homepage. So no need to make the redirection code as it will be invisible.
I did this for my blog http://omarjallouli.com but google still ranks my old blog pages better than the new ones.
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February 21st, 2010 at 8:51 am(And sorry for the first unfinished comment
[...] “Tools” section of the WordPress dashboard. Best of all, things to some advice from this article, I’ve even managed to preserve all my old [...]
March 2nd, 2010 at 2:19 amGreat post and thanks! Will this work for Blogger blogs that have been using their FTP publishing option? I already have a host and have been using Blogger to publish to it…
March 5th, 2010 at 11:58 am@Ethan—I haven’t tried it, but I think so. You might have to switch off the FTP publishing option before you do the import.
March 5th, 2010 at 12:04 pm