6 steps for Blogger migration to WordPress
Blogger is the quickest solution for those who want to start blogging ASAP. But what happens when you realise that your options are limited and your audience grows? Maybe you should start thinking about the WordPress solution. But shifting from Blogger to WP can lead to several issues such as losing your Google ranking or ending up with broken images or lost.
Here, are the #6 simple steps to migrate from Blogger to WordPress:
Step 1. Export your Blogger blog
Simply login to your blogger and go to Settings > Other. Under the “Import & back up” area, you can find the button “Back up Content”. On the pop up you need to click “Save to your computer”.
Now your Blogger content has been downloaded and saved to your computer as an XML file.
Step 2. Import Blogger to WordPress
Login to mydomain/wp-admin page and go to Tools > Import. On the Import page, you should choose Blogger and on the next pop up click on “Install” button.
WordPress will automatically download and install the “blogger importer” plugin and the only thing you need to do is to click on “Activate Plugin & Run Importer”. Then the WordPress will ask you to upload the XML file from step 1. As simple as that, click on “Upload and Import”.
The posts will be imported one by one and at the end, you will be asked to assign an author to them. You can choose yourself or add a new user/author.
Potential Problems: Maybe your hosting plan does not support the size of this file, so in that case, you need to contact your hosting company and ask them to maximize your file upload limit. Otherwise, you can choose Unicorn Hosting, it saves you time!
You have successfully imported your content! But wait don’t start celebrating yet!!
Tip: Importing from Blogger to WordPress may cause some minor formatting issues. You may have to go through your old posts to clean up awkward spacing, broken links, and other formatting issues.
Step 3. Setting up permalinks
Our main concern when switching from Blogger to WordPress is the Google Search rankings. So you need to take care of the URL structure and be sure that the links from the old blog go to the same content on the WP website.
After you have imported the content you need to keep the same as possible URL structure. So you go to Settings > Permalinks and choose “Month and Name” in common settings. By doing that you keep the same links to the WP website.
Step 4. Setting up the redirection from Blogger to WP posts.
This is the most important step in order to reassure that the users will end up to on the same page on the new site, while they are trying to access the old one. In that way, you keep live the old links but all the traffic will go to the new WP blog. This action also informs the search engines that the old site moved to a new location.
First, you need to set up the redirection on the blogger blog. Login to your Blogger and go to “Template”, where you find the “Revert to classic templates” at the bottom of the page. Switch to classic template and go to “Edit Template HTML” code box and paste the code you will find below. Don’t forget to click on “Save Templates”.
<html><head>
<title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>
<script>
<MainOrArchivePage>
window.location.
</MainOrArchivePage>
<Blogger>
<ItemPage>
window.location.href="https://your-domain.com/?blogger=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"
</ItemPage>
</Blogger>
</script>
<MainPage>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://your-domain.com/" />
</MainPage>
<Blogger>
<ItemPage>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://your-domain.com/?blogger=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" />
</ItemPage>
</Blogger></head><body>
<MainOrArchivePage>
<h1><a href="https://your-domain.com/"><$BlogTitle$></a></h1>
</MainOrArchivePage>
<Blogger>
<ItemPage>
<h1><a href="https://your-domain.com/?blogger=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><$BlogItemTitle$></a></h1>
<$BlogItemBody$>
</ItemPage>
</Blogger></body>
</html>
Testing: Add one of your Blogger posts URL to your browsers and see if this goes to the WordPress site.
For HTML dummies there is a plugin, which provides you the code: https://wordpress.org/plugins/blogger-to-wordpress-redirection/
Finally, you need to take one more action to setup the redirection on WP blog so as to ensure the best SEO for your new website. You need to add an extra code to the functions.php file which you can find on the Appearance > Editor > functions.php.
function blogger_query_vars_filter( $vars ) {
$vars[] = "blogger";
return $vars;
}
add_filter('query_vars', 'blogger_query_vars_filter');
function blogger_template_redirect() {
global $wp_query;
$blogger = $wp_query->query_vars['blogger'];
if ( isset ( $blogger ) ) {
wp_redirect( get_wordpress_url ( $blogger ) , 301 );
exit;
}
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'blogger_template_redirect' );
function get_wordpress_url($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();
}
Now the users who visit an old post we will be redirected to the exact same post on the WP blog.
Tip: Make sure that you don’t delete your old Blogger blog cause this will mess up the redirections.
Step 5. Setting up redirection for the RSS feeds
In case you had RSS subscribers to your blog, you should redirect them to the new website. You can go to the Blogger and Settings > Other and on the area “Post Feed Redirect URL” you can add the new WP site’s feed.
Tip: Usually the URL for that is the https://your-domain.com/feed/
Step 6. Migrating images from Blogger to WordPress
While importing the XML feed to WP, some of the images might fail to upload to the media gallery. If you go to the post though you will notice that the images are there. This happens because Blogger creates hotlinks to the images and they remain on Google’s server.
In case you don’t want to work further, you can keep the Blogger blog live and with it the images. If you belong to perfectionists, you can do our little trick and have the correct image links on the posts. Do I need to mention the benefits of your SEO here?
There is a useful plugin, created by Matt Mullenweg that scans all the content in order to find the hotlinked images and downloads them to the media library. The process is simple. You go to Plugins > Add New and search for Cache Images plugin and install it. Click on “Scanning” and select the server from which you want to get the images.
We have followed all the steps above to our recent work and the results were really satisfying.
Before you start, you need to choose a good WordPress hosting company and own a domain name. We recommend our business partner Unicorn Hosting, in order to avoid any headaches, so pick a hosting plan here.
Let us know in the comment section how the transition went for you. If you have any problems during the migration, leave any questions in the comments area and we’ll try to answer them as soon as possible.