How to migrate your blog from Blogger to WordPress

Blogger is a free tool to start blogging in these days, many bloggers have set up blogs (like abc.blogspot.com) just to have blogging. But soon after they realized the limitations of this subdomain and want to start the blogging on the self-hosted platform (like abc.com). Although there are many CMS, the most effective and user-friendly is WordPress. They also wished to keep rankings, Search Engine Traffic, users, subscribers and even fans.

But how…?

I will explain it in the easy steps to migrate from blogger to WordPress.

Note: It is recommended to create a backup of your blogger blog.

migrate from blogger to wordpress

How to migrate your blog from Blogger to WordPress:

  • First of all, you need a Self-hosted Domain, so just go ahead and purchase it.
  • Install WordPress (latest version from WordPress.org) and after that log in to Dashboard.
  • Go to your Dashboard > Tools> Import and click on Blogger.
  • This will guide to install Blogger Importer Plugin, so install and activate it.
  • On the next screen, you are asked to authorize WordPress to import your blogger blog. You need to click Authorize button on this Page. This will take you to the Google Account Page.
  • On your Google Accounts page, you will be notified that the application of WordPress is requesting permission to manage your Blogger account. You need to click on the Allow Access button to continue.
  • This will redirect back to WordPress dashboard where you will see a list of all blogs you have. Just to click the Blogger blog (you want to Import to WordPress) and click Import button next to it.
  • WordPress will start importing all your posts to new WordPress CMS, just wait to complete the process.
  • Next step is to set up a permalink structure for your new WordPress blog, just Go to Settings > Permalinks > and select the one.

Must Read: How to select the best web hosting company

Setting Up Redirection to WordPress Blog:

The next important step is to set up the redirection from your old blogger blog to the new self-hosted WordPress blog. So that users are redirected to your new blog without any interruption and will see exactly the same page. It is also important that the search engines will also be notified about this redirection so your blog might not face any loss of organic traffic.

Let’s first setup redirection on the blogger blog. For this follow the steps.

  • Log in blogger account > Go to the desired blog > Go to Settings Page>Template
  • Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on Revert to Classic Template link.
  • You will see the Edit Template HTML’ text area.
  • Replace all code with the code given below. ( remember to replace http://www.example.com with your domain)
DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"><$BlogPageTitle$>

<$BlogTitle$> <$BlogItemTitle$>

save your template, and now you have successfully redirected your blogger blog to new WordPress blog.

Now it is time to ready your WordPress blog to accept the redirection from old blogger blog for this simply

  • Go to WordPress dashboard > Appearance > Editor > and open functions.php file for editing (most of the WordPress themes have this file if not you can create this and upload to your theme folder using FTP)
  • Copy and Paste all the code snippet at the beginning of your function.php theme and click save.
query_vars['blogger'];
if ( isset ( $blogger ) ) {
wp_redirect( labnol_get_wordpress_url ( $blogger ) , 301 );
exit;
}
}

add_action( 'template_redirect', 'labnol_blogger_template_redirect' );

function labnol_get_wordpress_url($blogger) {
if ( preg_match('@^(?:https?://)?([^/]+)(.*)@i', $blogger, $url_parts) ) {
$query = new WP_Query (
array ( "meta_key" => "blogger_permalink", "meta_value" => $url_parts[2] ) );
if ($query->have_posts()) {
$query->the_post();
$url = get_permalink();
}
wp_reset_postdata();
}
return $url ? $url : home_url();
}

?>

We are almost done open any page and now it should redirect old blogger page to a new WordPress site.

Switching RSS Feeds from Blogger to WordPress:

On the blogger site your visitors will not able to see the changes you made in, for this following steps:

  • log in blogger >Go to Settings > other >and choose Post Feed Redirect URL under Site Feed. Here you can type the web address of your new WordPress RSS feed here and the existing RSS subscriber will automatically move to your news feed. If you are using Feed Burner just replace the source from Blogger RSS feed to your new WordPress feed.

Read Also: How to make your RSS feeds helpful for your SEO strategy.

You have done all now you have successfully migrated your blog from blogger to WordPress. So whenever a visitor tries to search your blog it will automatically redirect to the new domain.

We have redirected all blog posts, feeds, comments and everything to new WordPress blog but not the images, we also need not move them to the new setup and they are hosted safely on blogger, if you want to move then there is WordPress plugin to move your images from blogger to WordPress.

If you need any assistance and have any query regarding the article, feel free to contact.

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