The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress
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.
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. This is free with all Bluehost domains!
- 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.
3. Install WordPress. With Bluehost, just login to your control panel, click on Fantastico under Addons/Plugins, select WordPress on the left, click New Installation on the right. 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.
Prepare to transfer your feed: you don’t have to lose any subscribers
4. Now, 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 > 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”).
Transfer your feed: keep all your subscribers
7. Login to FeedBurner, go into the feed and click on “Edit Feed Details.” Change your feed address 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.
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 all your links will transfer automatically to your own domain, 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.
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.
Disclosure: the GoDaddy and Bluehost links are affiliate links.
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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 pm