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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.

290 replies on “The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress”

this 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!

Do 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.

My 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?

By Post Author

Makes 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.

You 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.

By Post Author

this is amazing!!!!!
it 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.

By Post Author

Got 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.

[…] 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 […]

Awesome!

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!

1.) 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).

By Post Author

This 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)?

@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.

By Post Author

I 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!

I’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!

By Post Author

Very 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.

Now, 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.

By Post Author

Thanks Jordan! Not what I wanted to hear tho 😉

Be 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!

Thanks, 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!

By Post Author

Hi,

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”

Hi 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! 🙂

@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!

By Post Author

I 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!

Hi 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.

@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!

By Post Author

Thank 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?

I 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.

By Post Author

Thanks 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. 🙂

Yesterday 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?

@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?

By Post Author

No 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.

Step 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.

Sorry 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.)

By Post Author

Thanks for this helpful post. Is it possible to transfer your comments if you’ve been using haloscan, not the blogger comment format?

thanks! Very appreciated. Not sure I’m up for it though. Haloscan may have anchored me to blogger.

Hi, 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.

You’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 .

By Post Author

Hi 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!

Hi 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!

Did 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.

By Post Author

Thanks 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)?

Krystyn—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.

By Post Author

Hi 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.

Yes, 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.

By Post Author

Hi, 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!

The 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.

By Post Author

Hi, 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 🙂

Have 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.)

By Post Author

I 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?

@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.

By Post Author

Amazing 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!

Thx for this great tutorial! I followed your instructions & now Im up & running on WordPress.

[…] 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 […]

This 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??

@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!

By Post Author

Great 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?

@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!

By Post Author

When 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.
(And sorry for the first unfinished comment 😀 )

Great 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…

@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.

By Post Author

Jordan, you are so good to write this terrific piece AND to respond to the many comments. What a lot of work, even months after publication!

My Blogger blog is published via ftp and I will have to migrate it to a new custom domain URL or a blogspot URL by May 1st. All my files are at my Bluehost-hosted mydomain.com/blog already and I’m wondering if there’s anything I should know before installing WordPress. Is it enough to have mydomain.com/blog in place and can I use that as my url? Please tell me it will be super easy 🙂

Thanks a million.

Thanks, Mary! I think you should be able to install WordPress in mydomain.com/blog, but it depends on what kind of files you already have there—it might replace some of your files. The only other problem you might have is that Blogger Custom Domain won’t do redirects to subdomains. :\

By Post Author

Thanks Jordan. I did the move today and thought it went fine – I had to first turn off ftp publishing and move to a blogspot url in order to import the old blog into WP. Then I spent the remainder of the day’s brainpower customizing the style sheet and getting things just so.

THEN I started clicking on the archive links and discovered a big mess. Some files got moved, some didn’t, some comments got moved and some didn’t. Some links to posts take me to the old blog. Some images moved and some didn’t. I can only hope that the solution will come to me in the morning!

[…] Blogger to this here WordPress. I used an extraordinarily useful resource from MamaBlogga called The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress. I would have been lost without […]

I read all the comments, and Im kinda stuck. Really Apreciate this post, helped alot. Im still stuck though :/
Blogger: http://www.djtexxxas.com
Wp: http://www.riddimhunter.com

Basically I did every thing, except step 7 feedburner.
when i go to blogger and put my new site riddimhunter.com it tells me
“The DNS record for your domain is not set up correctly yet. If you just purchased this domain the set up process may take up to a day. Learn more. ” is this whats missing?

if you go to http://www.djtexxxas.com/2009/10/feminine-riddim-2009.html it does not transfer you to the new site
Thanks

That warning means that your DNS records don’t point back to Blogger, which they won’t. For me, the domain still redirects (although they added an interstitial page about a year or two ago).

When I click on your link, it does redirect for me.

By Post Author

My blogger blog got deleted again apparently for spamming..Thou I know that there aren’t any spamming on my site. With this repeated deletions, I have decided to migrate to WordPress.
My Google and Blogger accounts are still accessible, but the blog was deleted a few days ago.

Here are my info:
I bought my domain at GoDaddy thru Blogger last Jan.2010
Blogger is hosting my site
My blog got deleted a few days ago but is not spam (still awaiting result of review)

Here are my questions:

1) How to get my domain out of blogger’s hosting and transfer it to BlueHost?
2) If ever my blog gets restored, would I be able to transfer all my blog posts without losing my Google and Alexa Rankings?
3) i have backed up my posts and downloaded xml. If my blog will not be restored,can I repost my articles on WordPress and won’t be penalized for duplicate contents?

Thanks in advance for helping a newbie..

@EihdraG—I’ve heard of that happening before (and if I remember correctly, I think it happened to me once on Blogger, and they did restore my blog).

1. To get your domain, I *think* this page can help: http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2008/04/managing-your-custom-domain.html

2. Alexa doesn’t do the transfer, but Google should recognize the transfer fairly quickly.

3. If the content isn’t available on your old site anymore, then there’s no reason to be penalized as duplicate content. But the steps above should make sure you don’t have a problem with duplicate content either way. (Although we should always note that this is one of those “black box” things in search engine algorithms—we can’t say for certain how it works.)

By Post Author

When I go into WP’s import tool, it shows me the target Blogger blog I’m trying to migrate, but it tells me there are no posts/comments there. This blog has over 3,000 posts, so it’s obviously not reading them somehow. Any ideas? The site is hosted at GoDaddy and published by FTP through Blogger. Thanks in advance.

I think you’ll have to switch off FTP publishing to do the transfer. Good luck!

By Post Author

Thanks for your reply. I have other questions. Pardon me for being naive as I am still a newbie at this.

1. If my blog at Blogger will not be restored, I won’t be able to get the permalinks, right? So, I have to say goodbye to the backlinks and PR?

2. I have backed up my articles, so since they deleted it, you said that I will not be penalized for duplicate content if I repost it on WordPress.But, would my articles still show when searched in search engines but then point to a dead link?

3. Can you point me to a tutorial on how to still use my domain at wordpress but will be hosting it at Hostgator?

4. I see my domain name is locked with Google, so how do I unlock it to be able to use it again and host it somewhere than Blogger?

this is really frustrating. Just when i finally got my well deserved PR and lots of backlinks and a million drop down on Alexa and this has happened to me now. I have been thinking of switching to wordpress but have put it off. I know I should have followed my instinct and went ahead and switched a long time ago..

Thanks again in advance for your response..

Hi Jordan-

Me again. Curious if you know this. Right now, I have a custom domain for my blogger account. Can I get a host and install WP on a subdirectory and mess with it and customize it there while leaving my blog on the custom domain? Does that make sense?

Thanks for your help.

tried migrating from blogger to wordpress and during the import process in wordpress i encountered this error message: “Unable to find the socket transport “ssl” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP? (0)” any thoughts on what i’m doing wrong?

@EihdraG—Yeah, I know how frustrating that is. If you have no access to your blogspot blog, then the permalinks won’t pass along. It’s possible that if you get control of yourblog.blogspot.com, the permalinks would work again, even if the posts themselves aren’t restored.

Google grooms out dead links from their index. But if the links can redirect to your new posts, they’ll all be okay.

I’m not sure what you mean in your third question—you’re running WordPress on Hostgator, right? Hostgator says they use Fantastico. See step three in the original ultimate guide for how to use Fantastico: http://www.mamablogga.com/the-original-ultimate-guide-to-migrating-from-blogger-to-wordpress/

You’ll have to contact Google, I believe. I found this article with Google: http://www.masskash.com/tag/google-blogger-domain-name/

@Krystyn—Should be totally fine!

@AlexP—See if these help: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/286296

By Post Author

Hi again Jordan,
I have already set up my WP blog and publishing under the same domain. i just have to set the DNS to point at Hostgator. Guess, I won’t be needing the permalinks afterall.. i dunno what happened or what I did, but I retained the PR and Alexa transferred on my WP blog. Though the comments as well cannot be imported.But at least, it wasn’t a hard transition..
Thanks, with your post and help, it’s a relieve to be able to post without fearing of deletion again..Not that my blog is indeed a spam..lol..
Again, many thanks, most specially for the helpful responses..

Help! I went thru all the steps ( using my custom domina and keeping at the same place)and 0 files from Blogger were imported, so it has the WP default page (installed WP thru Godaddy which has an easy installer). I did make an xml backup of the blog from Blogger plus saved all the individual files. Is there a way to use the xml file so that the original blog and posts willappear- or something else? Modify a WP php file ( I don’t know php but if there’s a simple line of code to change I can do that). Thanks so much for your help!

Time is ticking as Blogger migration ends in a day and myblog is in limbo. If you go to: janetscircle.com/blog/index.html you can still see it. When i try to post thru Blogger now it gets an error message and won’t post. WordPress admin goes to a version of the blog w some images missing. At this point I may try to go back to blogger and uninstall wordpress … Any suggestions?

Sorry, Janet—my mailbox was over quota, so I haven’t gotten comment notifications in a week. Did you get the xml upload or transfer to work?

By Post Author

I had been wanting to make the move from Blogger for quite some time now, so the FTP sunsetting just kinda forced us to get on with it. So, my wife & I just migrated our FTP-published Classic Blogger blog over to a self-hosted WordPress blog. She got all of the Blogger posts imported and they seem to be working just fine.

I was really confused about how WordPress shows a path to the new posts, yet they don’t actually exist in that structure the way that the Blogger post (.HTML) pages did. But Dede discovered that all of the post pages live within the WP database as virtual pages rather than literal .HTML files. So does this mean we’d be safe to delete the old Blogger structure now?

The biggest outstanding issue I’ve yet to sort out is that none of our old Blogger posts show up in the Archives dropdown widget. And none of the Blogger archive pages were pulled over. Any thoughts on this?

Also, I’m still figuring out how to tweak the themes code portions to make a few changes here & there, but I can’t get the pages styling (like the Hx font formatting, for example) to quite match the posts.

All WP posts are webpages (and actual files) rendered through the PHP programming language. The exact paths can be customized with redirects through WP. If you’re using redirects through Blogger (you can test to see if these are working), you need to leave the old Blogger posts in place. If you’re not redirecting your old Blogger (i.e. it’s not published anywhere), you can delete it.

WP creates its own archives (and you can use the Redirection plugin [with wildcards or on a month by month basis] to preserve those links). I see several months of archives in the pull down menu, but I can’t get to the archive pages. I’ve never seen this issue with a WP blog before, and it looks like the problem isn’t a WordPress issue. It looks like you may be missing the archives.php file or your server/other CMS is prohibiting permissions to these directories. Maybe http://wordpress.org/support/topic/302720 could help.

If you want to edit the stylesheet, in the WP admin, go to Appearance > Editor. The stylesheet should be up by default. (Though I don’t see any difference in the rendering of the your headers between posts and pages on my browser.)

Good luck and welcome to WP!

By Post Author

Hello,

First of all, I want to thank you very much for this fabulous tutorial! This has been very helpful to me as I moved my site from Blogger to WordPress last week.

I am encountering a few issues and have spent all week searching Google, blogs, support forums and talking to my host’s tech support staff; so I thought I might pose some of my questions here in case anyone reading this is having the same problems.

1. When someone types in my old URL, contest-corner.blogspot.com, it brings up a message from Blogger saying “You’re about to be redirected -The blog that used to be here is now at http://www.contest-corner.com/. Do you wish to be redirected?”. Unfortunately, because of this redirect message popping up,this has also changed the title and description of my pages in search engine results to “Redirecting”. See what I mean here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=coconut+flour+breadmaker&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGLL_en___US372
I am the #1 result on this page, but instead of giving the title and description of the page, it says this: “Blogger: Redirecting
Blogger is a free blog publishing tool from Google for easily sharing your thoughts with the world. Blogger makes it simple to post text, photos and video …”

Of course, this means that I have now lost all of my search engine traffic on all my old articles.
I’ve seen all sorts of articles about preserving SEO during a Blogger-to-WP move, but nothing on this particular issue.

2. I’ve noticed others above mentioning problems transferring content over from Blogger to WordPress, and I am also having issues. It seems that all of my posts have transferred over, but not the comments. The importer on WordPress only shows 62 comments on my Blogger blog when I have over 14,000. I have tried uploading the .xml export file from Blogger, and get an error every time. I used a XML splitter that I found via others who were having this issue, and was able to upload each individual .xml file, which worked somewhat better, but half my comments are still missing.

Hi Jordan,
Thanks for the great tutorial. I read through all the comments and am still a bit confused. I have a custom domain through GoDaddy that I use in blogger. I want to use that same domain (ourlittlebeehive.com) in WP. How do I style the WP blog, etc. while keeping the blogger domain active? Is it possible? Then when I’m ready to migrate from blogger to WP do I just switch the blogger back to blogspot.com and then follow the instructions above? Do I then keep the blogger blog at blogspot.com to preserve photos?

Thanks so much for your assistance!

@Beeb—I see your problem. I’m not sure if this is feasible for you, but you might try setting the DNS of your domain to the Google servers long enough to get the “legit” Custom Domain effect. Wait a few days to search engines log the redirect, then switch off the custom domain and delete that post from the old blog. Meanwhile, contact anyone you know with links to that post and ask them to update them, and work to get new links to that post with the new URL. You might see a dip in search engines, but if you continue to try to build links, you should be able to recover.

As for the comments problem, sorry! It’s a problem with WordPress and AFAIK they haven’t fixed it.

@Felicity—Looking back over the comments, it looks like people usually have to switch to a blogspot address to set up the WP blog (unless you want to put the blog in a subdomain on your new site—or, you could set up a subdomain on your new site for testing purposes. You’ll still have to switch to blogspot for the import, but you’ll have a chance to test your layout first.) And yes, I believe you should keep the blog at blogger to keep the photos (though above I recommend switching back on the custom domain option, but since your links won’t need redirection, that’s not as important. You can block search engines from the old version of your blog once it’s on blogspot to avoid a possible duplicate content penalty.).

By Post Author

Jordan – I can’t tell you how incredibly grateful I am for your help! I have literally been searching everywhere and you are the only person I’ve spoken to who knew anything about this SEO issue.

So let me make sure I follow correctly: Say I switch the DNS of my domain to the Google servers – I take it that will change my URLs from contest-corner.blogspot.com/2010/mycoolpost.html to contest-corner.com/2010/mycoolpost.html? So then theoretically, once search engines pick that up, I should be able to point the domain over to WP, delete the Blogger post and it should get rid of the redirect? Or at least get rid of the redirect description when the post shows up in search results? (Sorry if I’m way off here, I’m still learning my way around DNS issues!)

I don’t think it would really be possible to do that on Contest Corner right now, because I have so much new content at the WP site and giveaways going on. However, I am planning to switch my other blog over to WP this month, so this is invaluable advice of what to do beforehand.

I did tell Blogger not to list Contest Corner in search engines, but that hasn’t helped so far. Do you think I should delete the posts on my Blogger blog (after I back everything up of course)? Do you know if search engines will eventually pick up the old articles at their new location on WP? In many instances, my articles might not have a lot of people linking to it, but it comes up high in search results because of the topic it covers (for instance, I seem to have the only recipe for breadmaker bread made with coconut flour out there – LOL!); that’s why I’m wondering what to do about how search engines are showing the content now.

And, thanks so much for the answer on the comments, too! That was what I was assuming and I’m hoping that after WP 3.0 comes out that they might have addressed the bug.

Wow, that was a long comment. Thank you so much again for all your time in answering my question and making this awesome tutorial. I’m going to give your link to everyone I know!

~Beeb

Ok, just to recap: My wife & I migrated from self-hosted (Classic) Blogger to self-hosted WordPress this month. The domain remains the same and we were able to duplicate the year/month permalink structure, so all of the old pages still worked great. I could access those older posts directly or via Categories, but…

None of the pages with our old imported Blogger posts showed up in the Archives dropdown widget. The May 2010 archive (which would have only posts created in WordPress) worked, but accessing any Archive month prior to that resulted in this error:

Directory has no index file.
Browsing this site or directory without an index file is prohibited.

Then it hit me that there’s no actual /2010/05 folder corresponding to the May Archive – it’s just a virtual location. (I’m a rank newbie, so my understanding of this whole real vs. virtual structure might not be all that accurate, but you get the idea.) But there is an actual folder for each month prior to that where Blogger stored the individual post page HTML files. So on a whim, I renamed one of those folders and blammo! the Archive worked for that month. Apparently, there being an actual folder in a location where WP points to virtually was a BIG no-no.

Anyway, I thought I’d post this just in case some other Blogger expatriates were running into the same snag.

Did anybody figure out the best way to import comments in addition to posts? Maybe the comments need to be in a certain format? Or maybe the blog needs to be a typical template?

@Beeb—Well, that’s the idea 😀 . Once you delete the Blogger posts, the remaining links to the .blogspot.com version won’t work (which is why you should contact anyone you can with links). I don’t think the option to keep your blog out of search engines from Blogger will work—it adds a meta tag to your posts, but your posts are (supposed to be) redirected to your new WP set up that doesn’t have the meta tag.

@Rob—Must be a Blogger FTP/WP issue. Thanks for sharing the solution!

@Krystyn—Last time I looked, there was no solution, sadly. But you can try the WordPress Forums to see if they’ve updated that feature yet: http://wordpress.org/support/

By Post Author

thanks for all the tip! i wish i had found them BEFORE i paid someone to transfer me from blogger to wordpress. i was hoping you might have a suggestion….

I’ve been a dot com (not .blogspot) for years & have had feedburner feed associated with it for some time (again, not a .blogspot feed).

Prior to switching to wordpress, in my google reader, my feed showed as a feed burner feed.

After the designer switched me to wordpress, the feed in my google reader showed up as .blogspot feed & is obviously no longer updating

Now, when I log into my feedburner account, I’ve lost thousands of subscribers (because I believe they too all got switched to .blogspot)

Is there any way to fix this? Do I make any sense?

thanks so much! i appreciate any & all help.

Hm… You still have your old blog running in Blogger, right? Is it publishing to a .blogspot.com address? If so, try steps 4 and 7 above (and optionally, step 8).

By Post Author

thanks for this post, i have been looking for a way to move my blog to wordpress.

I’m confused about steps 4 and 7. Are you using the same feed both times? It looks like you have one set up, then you change it to another one? Or, do I use the same both times? If I’ve already got a feed, I just leave it in blogger, but update it in wordpress, right?

Me again. I’ve got about 1200 404 errors now logged in just one week from post titles being different. I guess I have to go in and change each one of those one at a time, right?

Hey Krystyn—sorry about the delay; I had a baby two weeks ago so I’m a little behind on replies.

You use the same FeedBurner feed both times, but you change the Original Feed in FeedBurner from pointing to Blogger to pointing to WordPress (step 7). The name of the feed (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/FEEDNAME) must stay the same. You’ll leave it as-is in Blogger.

You might try a plugin to remove the stop words to match Blogger’s URLs, such as this one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/remove-stopwords-from-slug/ . You set the stop words (a, an, the, of—whatever Blogger removed from URLs).

By Post Author

Jordan-
Congratulations! No worries at all!

I think I’m going to have to change almost every single post title anyways. The posts got ‘2’s added to the end of the names also because I ended up importing duplicate posts! Not fun when there are almost 800 posts!

[…] have to give the credit for this painless migration to two people. Mama Blogga wrote this awesome guide to migrating. It was so comprehensive, in fact, that I only had one issue. And the issue had […]

hi,thanks for the tutorial,and how to change /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html to /%postname% i have searched a lot but could not find one,you to have said as additional steps but please explain me what are the additional steps to change permalinks structure while migration

This is the technical way to do it; I’m sure there’s a plugin that can do this, too, but this is how I did it.

In BlueHost, I opened the File Manager to the directory root, and made sure the check box for “Show hidden files” is CHECKED. Then I opened the file .htaccess in the Code Editor. (This file is VERY sensitive so you have to be very careful.)

Leave what’s there in place. On a new line below that, add:
RedirectMatch 301 /200(6|7)/.*/(.*)\.html http://www.mamablogga.com/$2/

(It goes on a single line, and of course you’ll want to change mamablogga.com to your domain, and customize the year part correctly: 200(5|6|7|8|9) would cover 2005 through 2009, for example.)

By Post Author

HELP!! I did all of the things you said. Except the name of my blog is the same. I have my own domain. Now my blog is just the “Hello World” page on WP!! How can I get my posts moved over… ???

If you’re using Blogger’s Custom Domain, you need to switch to a .blogspot.com address before you import. Also, change your Blogger version to block search engines. If you’ve been using a custom domain for a long time, most of your links should already be correct.

By Post Author

I made the move seemingly seamlessly, however when I try to go to my old blogger blog: apassionforbags.com, as a curious visitor, a window opens and says

Google Error

Not Found
The requested URL / was not found on this server.

I’d need a lot more information to really start looking for the cause here, but I can make a blind guess. If you’re moving from apassionforbags.com to a new URL, and you turned off Blogger’s Custom Domain to make the transfer, the old URL wouldn’t work until you turned back on Blogger’s Custom Domain.

Or, if you’re not changing URLs, you’ll need to change your nameservers for apassionforbags.com to match your new host.

By Post Author

“Also, change your Blogger version to block search engines.”

You mentioned this…do you mean, in blogger, block the search engines? Wouldn’t that also blog search engines from your WP blog if they come via your old blogger blog?

In Blogger, go to Settings > Basic (the default page under Settings). Find the question “Let search engines find your blog?” and change the answer to No. This inserts a meta element in the version of your blog on .blogspot.com that tells search engines not to crawl that page. It can’t influence your blog on your new host and won’t change anything there. In this case, search engines actually can’t come from your blogspot.com blog to your new site unless it’s through old links on the blog using the custom domain. But they won’t need to, either. Search engines have already indexed your site using the custom domain URL, so they’ll return directly to that URL for periodic checks.

As I said before, I only recommend this if you’ve been using Blogger’s Custom Domain. This is because existing links to your blog should use the custom domain already, so they’ll go straight to your new blog. They won’t have to go through your old blog to work. (People using a .blogspot.com address need the redirects to work for existing links to work. However, Blogger is working very hard to break that capability.)

Search engines will penalize sites that simply repeat the content of other sites. (Most likely, your new site would be considered the “true” version, and the old blogspot version would be penalized—i.e. excluded from the results. You’ve seen those “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the one already displayed.” warnings in search results pages.)

I think the duplicate content penalty search engines may impose is probably not going to be a huge problem, but this avoids the issue altogether.

By Post Author

[…] The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress: provides simple instructions that guide you from prep, to installation, to fixing broken links, and includes how to move your feed seamlessly. (I’ll need you to tell me if it worked.) […]

Jordan… Thanks! That worked except only 16 old posts switched over. I hit Restart (oops) and now I can not get the other posts. Is there a way to start over?

Hm… Have you tried deleting the transferred posts and running the import again?

By Post Author

first I already transfered a blog to wordpress, doing it the hard way, first to wordpress.com then to self hosted so that all the images get hosted there (bluehost), but the posts are all messed up.
So what if I only import the posts from blogger and just make the blog at blogger private and restrain search engines to index it? (and leave all images where they are, at picasa web albums)
Because if I import the import the images at bluehost it will take time for search engines to pcik up on them right?
I think someone aksed this, but if a insert the meta tag that prevents search engines to index the old blogspot blog, then it wouldn’t index the images at the wordpress blog too, or am I wrong? (I hope I am)

If you’re not already using the Custom Domain option with Blogger, once you turn it on (as per above directions), you don’t have to worry about search engines indexing the old blog. (If you are currently using Custom Domain, then do switch on the block search engines option under Settings.)

Definitely leave your pictures where they are in Picasa. I’ve never had a problem with my pictures that are still hosted there. It should only take a few days for search engines to reassign the URL associated with the pictures (if they’re not already displaying them directly from Picasa Web Albums, that is).

And no, the meta tag on the blogspot blog can’t change anything on the new blog. But again, you only want to use that option if you’ve already been using Blogger’s Custom Domain option on your old blog. Otherwise, search engines won’t be able to find your new blog from your old blog.

By Post Author

Ok, I just got one more question, and it might be a stupid one, but I got to make sure. After I successfully move the blog to wordpress, should I delete the profile of the old .blogspot.com blog at Google’s Webmaster central, or should I just add the new blog there and keep them both? (this also aplies for yahoo’s and bing’s webmaster tools)

Yep. An old .blogspot.com blog should be redirecting to its Custom Domain (and your new website). There’s not going to be any reason or advantage to keep it on Webmaster Central (or the others).

By Post Author

@Sarah
You are right to be scared, because it’s not as simple as a blogger blog, you need to be just a little bit more skilled, basic knowledge of HTML is needed. BUT self-hosted wordpress blog is ALMIGHTY compared to a blogger blog, the level of customization is way ahead of a blogger blog.
It really depends on the purpose of the blog.
Some say that self-hosted blogs get better page ranks in search results etc. if you are not interested in page ranks, just buy a custom domain through blogger.
I transfered two of my blogs and I am satisfied, if all goes well I will migrate all my blogs to wordpress.
Basically if you don’t mind paying a little extra, you should definitely try it out, you’ve got nothing to lose, JUST REMEMBER to follow the instructions here.

a SUGGESTIONS TO THE BLOGMASTER: since many people use this guide to migrate to wordpress and this post has a lot of comments, maybe you could look up the most common questions in the comments and update the post…

@Sarah I agree with Slavco…. I just switched and write about my experience. I put this page here as a resource and there are a few others. It is worth it, I think once you get it running. Just be prepared, it may take a couple days to take all the steps to get it online depending on how much customization you want. Good luck!!

Jordan a great article and comments from you. I have just spent an absorbing hour reading them.

I have recently set up a WP blog with a new custom domain which is working fine.

I was already using a custom domain on Blogger which is still PR 3 but seemed to be suffering some sort of Google penalty since- suddenly dropped from Serps last September. So I have taken the rather extreme step of starting again.

I do not want Google to associate my new blog with my old one so I am rewriting a lot of my previously high ranking posts and republishing on the new domain rather than migrating them.

On my old blog I have 180 odd subscribers who I have tried to contact, but fear I have missed a lot.

So now to my questions:

1. Can I use the redirect (step 9 above) to send any old readers and new ones from search engines to my new WP blog?

2. Would I need to do step 10 as well?

3. and the biggy… if I am indeed subject to a Google penalty will the redirect indicate to big G what I am up too and thus condemn my new blog to Google hell before its even indexed?

You thoughts are very much appreciated.

Hi Jordan – I just wanted to come back and thank you so much again for your help. I followed your advice about switching to the custom domain on Blogger on my second blog before making the switch, and it worked great – it really helped to preserve the integrity of my links on Google.
Also, on the first blog that I switched over and had all the trouble with – I found that after a few weeks, the new URL started to pop up higher in the search results and replace the blogspot URL, so I got my search engine traffic back there as well. HOORAY!

Thank you so much for your awesome blog!

hello jordan. Thanks for a nice briefing. I start a new wp blog with custom domain in free hosting. But i want to move now paid hosting. so how can i choose good paid hosting.

i have a blog in blogspot and i am wondering if it is possible to leave a comment to a wordpress blog. I tried but i can not find the way. thank you

You just left a comment on a WordPress blog.

But if you’re asking if you can sign in with your Blogger login on a WordPress.com blog, then, no, there’s no way to do that. You can either leave a comment and enter your URL manually or create a WordPress.com account.

By Post Author

I just finished migrating my blog from blogger to wordpress. I was terrified until I found your article and it went without a hitch! Thanks so much! I had my own domain name with my blogger site, all I had to do was take off the domain name and change the DNS settings with the registrar to point to bluehost. I am so happy I changed too, I am really loving wordpress so much!

THANK YOU so very much for this resource. I cannot begin to tell you how invaluable it was today while I migrated my blogger blog over to WP. Especially the feed and redirection information.
You ROCK!

Hey Jordan! Thanks so much for this wonderful tutorial. What an excellent resource!

I’m in the middle of a Blogger-to-WP switch that has gone horribly awry, and was wondering if you had any thoughts. Basically, my Blogger file is just too dang big. With 900 posts and 22,000 comments, it’s coming out to about 48 MB, and I can’t get WordPress (self-hosted) to import it. I tried exporting the Blogger XML file and running it through http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com/, but it was too big for that too. I’m totally stuck and was just wondering if you had any ideas. 🙂

Thanks!

Hi Jen! I’m a big fan of your blog, and happy to help.

The WordPress Codex offers one idea: you can manually increase the allowable file import size. Of the options to do this, editing wp-config.php is probably the easiest. If you log in to your hosting service, you can find this file in the root directory of your blog.

Add the line define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64MB'); (with straight quotes, not curly ones) to that file below the other definitions.

The Codex offers some more ideas here: http://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_Working_with_WordPress#How_do_I_Import_a_WordPress_WXR_file_when_it_says_it_is_too_large_to_import.3F

Good luck, and let me know how it works out!

By Post Author

Excellent suggestions, Jordan! I’ll give them a shot. Thanks so much for your response and your kind words. Keep up the great work you’re doing with this blog — I’m a long-time reader and love your posts.

why don’t yiou use the blogger import plugin anyway? it’s easier and imports the posts with dates, with the XML file it imports them on one date.

That might be another option, but I’m guessing the built-in WordPress capability to import Blogger blogs (which usually imports all posts with dates by itself) was a problem because Jennifer’s blog is so large. I’ve never heard of that problem with an XML import.

By Post Author

slavco –

Unfortunately the import plugin doesn’t work. The error message isn’t clear, but from research it would seem that the problem is that my blog is too big.

I didn’t realize that the XML import often loses dates. Yikes!

yes it doesn’t work, you need to change it a little bit, could you post the error here, and I ‘ll see if it’s the same problem and tell you how to fix it. It’s sort of a general bug but there’s a fix to it.

Slavco and Jordan –

Interesting update: all I had to do was upgrade the Blogger-to-Wordpress plugin, and the dreaded “Invalid Auth Sub Token” error was fixed. It turns out that the size of my blog wasn’t an issue after all. Whew!

Here’s another question for any feed gurus out there:

Though I’ve been using Feedburner for a couple years, I still have hundreds of people subscribed to Blogger’s default feed location: mysite.com/feeds/posts/default. The default feed location once I switch over to WP will be mysite.com/feed. I’ll update Feedburner, which will take care of the people who’ve subscribed to feeds.feedburner.com/conversiondiary, but how do I keep those readers who are subscribed to that Blogger feed? I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions! Thanks!

From #4 above (it’s kinda buried in there): login to Blogger and go to Settings > Site Feed. In the Post Feed Redirect URL box, enter your FeedBurner address. This will help redirect your subscribers.

HTH!

By Post Author

Hey Jordan –

Thanks for your response! I don’t *think* that will work for me since I already have a custom domain, i.e. a lot of people’s feed readers are pointing to mysite.com/feeds/posts/default — but once I transfer the DNS to point the domain to my new host, Blogger no longer has any control over what happens with mysite.com, so I don’t think any redirects from Blogger’s end would help. (However, I do think the Blogger redirect would work for people who are subscribed to oldaddress.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default from back before I had the custom domain.)

I’m working on figuring out how to put a redirect in place on my new host that will send /feeds/posts/default to my Feedburner feed. I’ll let you know if I figure it out!

Again, thanks for all your wonderful help!

@Jennifer—ah, I see. I thought you were asking about hte other way.

Julie’s idea is great! If it doesn’t work out, you could try using the Redirection plugin to redirect /feeds/post/default to /feed/ . If you’re feeling really brave, you might try doing that by hand in .htaccess. I’m not totally sure any of those will work because of all the redirects it’ll involve, but it’s worth a shot!

By Post Author

@julie-inspired
But if you change to the original blogspot.com address then you might lose search engine ranks and it would be a duplicate blog since the same content will be found at two web addresses.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO is create a feedburner.com feed (google service too) for the original feed and then use the feedsmith plugin that will point readers to the feedburner feed. this way you won’t lose any readers.
if yo need any help, just write….

The question was about redirecting feeds to FeedBurner feeds, so I would assume Julie was referring to that, too. You’re right about FeedBurner and FeedSmith as great resources—the original post here already advises readers to use them both.

When dealing with Custom Domains, the search engine ranking shouldn’t be affected if the URL is staying the same (or being redirected properly). Blogger doesn’t administer a redirect and the same content is simply available from on a different host.

Duplicate content filters, which we don’t totally understand because it’s all part of Google’s secret sauce, don’t automatically mean that all your listings will be removed. However, it’s also easily solved in Blogger: go to Settings and scroll down to “Let search engines find your blog?” Change the answer to No and Save Settings.

I realize this may look like a “just” a mom blog, but I’ve worked in SEO and Internet marketing since I graduated college.

By Post Author

Hi Jordan,

This is a great tutorial and I’ve used it a few times for my blog clients who have wanted to switch from Blogger. I just did one, and we lost almost all 600 of her subscribers. I followed each step above and here’s what I have for settings…do you see anything wrong?

Redirect in Blogger: http://feeds.feedburner.com/clientsblog/LWCo (this last part was in her feed…)

Feedburner Original Feed: http://clientsblog.com/feed/

Feedsmith Plugin: http://feeds.feedburner.com/clientsblog (is this right?)

I know you’re busy…any ideas would be greatly appreciated! I cant find any help in the Feedburner forums.

Hm…

I *think* you need the extra /LWCo on the FeedSmith one, but I’m not sure.

(If she was using a custom domain before, most of her subscribers probably subscribed to hjttp://clientsblog.com/default/feeds/posts/ or whatever the default string is in Blogger there. I know Jennifer from Conversion Diary above was looking for a solution to that. There’s a chance an htaccess handler might fix it.)

By Post Author

Thanks for your response Jordan. I actually found the solution and thought it might help someone else here too!

You are right on…95% of her feeds were still through the Blogger default feed. All I had to do was install the “Simple 301 Redirect” plugin (http://www.scottnelle.com/simple-301-redirects-plugin-for-wordpress/), enter the original Blogger feed to redirect to the Feedburner feed and voila! All her subscribers came back on board by her next post. I hadn’t even considered that that might be the case.

Thanks again for your reply. I know (trust me…I know…) you can get a lot of questions from complete strangers and there’s nothing compelling you to answer them but pure kindness! Thanks again! 😉

Awesome, Nicole!

The Simple 301 Redirect plugin creates an htaccess handler—I’d wondered if that would work. I’m excited to hear that it did!

I use Urban Giraffe’s Redirection plugin for my redirects, which works the same way.

Thanks for following up!

By Post Author

Jordan-

It’s been a while…if the blogger site is already on a custom domain, which would you recommend first; changing the DNS settings with the registrar and then making the feedburner, etc changes in blogger or the reverse? I really don’t remember what I did last time.

Man, I really just need to write a whole post about using a custom domain—these issues just come up so often!

Let’s see. If I remember correctly, you’ll want to change the DNS first. The WP import doesn’t work very well with the custom domain, and the site won’t display at all if you haven’t changed the name servers.

HTH!

By Post Author

Hi,

Let me first say that I love this posting. I have a question or questions. I just switched over and so far I’m pretty good, though I’m still nervous/on-edge/ crossmy fingers and praying that my ranking remains the same of get better (i know it will in time), but I just dont want anything to drop.

My question to you is: well, let me first explained what i did.

blog: http://somerandomname.blogspot.com
1: in January/February I switched from blogspot to the domain via goaddy. So http://www.somerandomname.com

2. I moved all the postings, changed the permalinks to look just like those of blogger. And setup my site.

3. changed the nameservers on godaddy to bluehost. (this morning around 5am). I had a slight issue my wordpress blog wasnt showing, but that was because the redirection plugin bugs my site, so had to disable it.

4. I went to blogger, changed settings so that the blogger site would not be crawled. And I reverted the address back to blogspot, so back to http://somerandomname.blogspot.com. And I created a new post showing people where to go.

5. My site is up, but still cant be seen by all, some people are getting “google: website not found on server” message, but bluehost says that everything looks fine and its probably just take some servers longer than others to come up, but to just give it 24hours.

Okay, so my question is:

What do you suggest I do to my blogspot.com blog. I tried entering the code above, but it didn’t work?

I would have just left it and not reverted it back to blogspot, but I thought that it was creating an error and just did it, which I sorta regret, but not too much since many people do encourage reverting back and adding the “dont crawl” on blogger and putting “do crawl” on the new website.

Please help. Thanks!

Also, what’s the best way to handle the feed?

I’m sorta scared with this because I used/use my feed for the sitemap. And am fearful that changing the feed will mess up the sitemap and mess up my rankings. Lets say my current feed is at feedburner.com/somerandomname

Do I have to create a new name for my feed? Can i use feedburner feed on wordpress? Will I have to resubmit the site map and will it affect my rankings at all?

sorry if too many questions, but I REALLY REALLY appreciate it…. and am nervously going through this process as we speak.

Alright, so I read through all the comments and feel a little better, and more importantly I can better articulate my questions/issues.

– i already switched to a custom domain
– I already imported my postings with wordpress’s plugin.
– all my permaklinks work perfectly
– (i used a temporary url to create the new website)
– so yesterday: i switched the dns, turned my robots plugin on to allow crawling of my website on wordpress, i came back to blogger and reverted back to .blogspot and turned “off” the crawling of the site for .blogspot.

my rankings are still okay its been about 36 hours (lets pray they stay that way).

my question is:

Should I…

A: go back to the custom url on my blogspot and keep the crawling “off”? (this will allow blogspot to automatically redirect to my website even though that message screen pops up, and it blocks indexing of the old site all .blogspot)

B: go back to the custom url on blogspot and turn the crawling “on”? (i figure if i go back to custom then if i use block then it may block my wordpress site too, and maybe by having it on my info will be less affected since everything online already shows up as my custom domain anyway)

C: leave it be. and keep the .blogspot and turn the indexing “off”?

Now my part II is about feed.

– I have my old feed, and never updated it from .blogspot when I switched to a custom domain, but since blogger automatically redirects it still worked.

– when i follow your directions above and switch feed, what happens to the old feed? does it disappear? Like if someone wanted to look at all my feed in one place, could they do that?

– my new wordpress feed myblogname.com/feed only has about 10 articles, recent ones. Is that correct? Or should I be able to see the old feed too?

Thanks Jordan, I really do appreciate all the help!

Glad the comments have helped! There’s a lot of good info in there.

If the vast majority of your links use the somerandomname.com custom domain URL, then it probably won’t matter a whole lot which you do. Links that use the somerandomname.com version will continue to work.

However, if you have a lot of links to the somerandomname.blogspot.com URL, and the Meta refresh above doesn’t work for you, you’ll want to turn the custom domain back on to keep the redirects working (with the interstitial page).

If you have the custom domain on, I don’t think it makes a big difference whether you have indexing on or off. If all redirects are working properly he search engine won’t ever see the Blogger-generated page that has the code blocking search engines on it in the first place.

Hope that helps!

By Post Author

On feeds:

This is one reason to keep the custom domain working.

If you switch to FeedBurner in Blogger, Blogger automatically redirects to the FeedBurner version of the feed. The FeedSmith plugin does this for WordPress (though I believe they work in different ways). The old feed doesn’t disappear per se, but if you try to go to the old URL, it’ll just take you to the new one.

You’ll also want some sort of redirection plugin (or .htaccess) to use a 301 redirect on yourblogdomain.com/default/feeds/posts/ (or whatever the default Blogger string is there) to your new feed.

Sometimes FeedBurner only displays the 10 most recent items, so without looking deeper I can’t say whether it’s a problem or normal.

By Post Author

I am stumped at step#9. I tried tryping in my new domain and it shows that the domain has been taken. then I tried Advence Setting.

When I browse it shows:”You’re about to be redirected
The blog that used to be here is now at http://www.bestlifequotesblog.com/.
Do you wish to be redirected? ”

Is that what is suppoesed to be?

There is a problem. I have just published (before transfer) a new post and it doesn’t show up. What did I screw up here. Please advise.

Regards,
kertoon

Yeah, that’s the interstitial page they’ve added. Right now there’s no way around that.

If you published the post on your Blogger blog after you imported the posts to the WordPress version, it won’t show up. If you published it shortly before importing the posts to the WordPress version, it might be that it didn’t have time to fully “register” before WordPress did the import.

By Post Author

Thank you for your prompt reply. Interestingly, now it doesn’t show the “Redirected” page anymore, but instead it directly shows my old site for a few seconds then it transfers to my new WordPress site.

But it comes with another problem. When I click on my internal links, they show the actual pages for a few seconds and then they all transfer to my news site, but to the HOMEPAGE!

That sounds like the meta refresh. Did you turn off the custom domain setting? If custom domain is on, you shouldn’t ever see your old site.

By Post Author

What do you mean by turn off the custom domain? Anyway, could you do me a big favor? Click on my site: http://bestlifequotesblog.com, and let know what do you see from there? Does it go straight to the above URL or does it go to old blogger site first then only transfer to my new site?
Thank you in advance.

I mean the publish to a custom domain option in Blogger.

It goes straight to your site without stopping at the old one.

Is it working for internal pages now?

By Post Author

Still in the shambles. It still goes to my old Blogger site then redirects to my new site on WordPress. The internal links from posts still direct to the old posts (Blogger) for a couple of seconds, then redirects to the HOMEPAGE of the new site, instead of the requested posts!

By the way, I have been tweaking and tempering, reading and re-reading, cussing for the past few days trying to get my site working. Yes, it is working in order now. No more erratic redirecting.
Anyway, thank you for your assistance as well.

[…] A Google search resulted in finding great on-line sources like the Devil’s Workshop and Mama Blogga . These two sites offered step-by-step break downs of what it took to flip the switch. With their […]

Thanks for the article. If you’re still around, I might need another advice. Now I have registered mydomain.com through blogger and I have aroud 600 posts. I would like to move mydomain.com to another hosting provider and in the same time to move all the posts with permalinks and I would like to make this as transparent as possible since I wouldn’t like to lose any visitor.
I’ve noticed that blogger would right trim in the permalinks all the title posts that exceedes 60 chars. How can I solve this issue with wordpress?
Thanks.

Thanks for the awesome guide! I’m preparing to make this move in late December (I’ve been preparing for months; I’m PETRIFIED about it! lol) and I have a question that I haven’t been able to find an answer for. If I already have a custom domain and I’m keeping that domain when I make the switch from Blogger to WP, do I need to redirect my feedburner feed? Isn’t my feed staying the same since my domain won’t be changing?

You need to have some redirect in place, since your readers will probably be subscribed to youraddress.com/feeds/posts/default (or whatever the structure Blogger uses) *or* feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeed . Youraddress.com/feeds/posts/default should be redirected to /feed/ (the URL WordPress uses). You can use a plugin like Redirection to do this.

It also can’t hurt to use the FeedBurner redirect, if there’s anyone still using youroldaddress.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default (if you ever used a blogspot address).

You’ll probably want to update the “Original feed” address in FeedBurner, too, so you don’t create any loop problems or unnecessary redirects.

I definitely need to write a version of this for people on custom domains!

By Post Author

Yeah, us custom domainers are in a class by ourselves! 🙂

I just wanted to thank you, both for your response and for this great guide. You were the first one that made it clear that it was the publishing system, not just the domain that determined the RRS address, and thanks to your guide and a few others I was able to migrate successfully without any broken links and with maintained page rank and SEO.

Two things for those that might be interested. I used an incredibly easy plugin called “Maintain Blogger Permalinks” that worked wonderfully for automatically finding and fixing my broken links. And Feedsmith, sadly, is no longer operational with the current version of WordPress.

Thanks again!

Help! I redirected my feed using the redirection plugin, but it’s not taking me anywhere. When I enter the feeds/posts/default address, I just get taken to a blank page asking me to subscribe to RSS but not showing anything. Any ideas? I’m totally panicked! 🙂

Though I guess this could be a propagation issue, since that seems to have been responsible for most of my snags so far…

Many thanks for this great tutorial. I found you via a google search and I was able to quickly and easily import all of my blogspot posts to my new self-hosted domain. Thanks again!

[…] to WordPress? There are a few guides online; this one seems to be the most comprehensive: The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress | MamaBlogga __________________ To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 0 or greater. […]

Thank you so much. I just put the code in blogger that redirects my blog in a second to my wordpress blog. Your instructions are the best on the subject.

[…] experience is limited but quickly growing. So far I’ve found these two websites for guidance:The New Ultimate Guide for Migrating from Blogger to WordPressMigrate your Blog from Blogger to WordPress with all the Google […]

Thanks so much for this guide. I’ve bookmarked it. I had been in a quandary for several days after migrating and this finally put the finishing touches on a blog I just moved to self hosting.

Thanks. This was very helpful in transferring everything over from Blogger to WordPress. You’re directions were extremely easy – which I really needed! Thanks again!

Just wondering if anyone knows… can I have more than one blog within a blog on WordPress? Does that even make sense? So that I can have a feed about cooking, one about family life, one about schooling, etc. and they’re all on one main blog but readers can subscribe to only the ones that interest them.

[…] have to give the credit for this painless migration to two people. Mama Blogga wrote this awesome guide to migrating. It was so comprehensive, in fact, that I only had one issue. And the issue had […]

Thanks so much for this information! It gave me enough info to feel ready to make the switch over. I am using godaddy as a host and domain which took some time navigating all that. A few questions-
1.
When creating a post do I log into the godaddy site to use wordpress or go to the wp-admin site directly? If I use godaddy I can’t seem to find where I would login. I have installed wordpress in godaddy by it does not show under my applications. When I log into word press using stavishclan.com/wp-admin I have no problems but am not sure if this is not going to my hosting site on godaddy. I am just confused!
2.
After coverting my blog from blogger all my posts and titled to each post has < at the beginning of it. Any idea why this might be and how to solve it?
3.
I did not see the options to change the permalinks on my dashboard anywhere. What am I missing?

Answers!

1. Yep, when you create a post, you’ll login through the wp-admin address.

2. That’s weird! I’ve never heard of that, but I don’t think it’ll hurt anything, since they’re not in the URLs.

3. Oh, looks like they’ve changed the names of a couple things; I’ll have to update the article. In your dashboard, on the left-hand side, you’ll click on Settings, then Permalinks.

By Post Author

Thanks so much for your reply! I’m happy to hear I’m on the right track afterall. Everything is just so new with lots of new vocab! So I have another few questions. I am still trying to edit Permalinks and the option for Permalinks is not under Settings. I’m also trying to add a plug in to do the Redirection but am not finding a Plugin Option on my dashboard either. Any idea why I may not have these options?

Are you on self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.com? Some of the code in your site seems to indicate you’re on WordPress.com using your own domain. You don’t need hosting from GoDaddy to do that—but you can’t edit your permalinks or use plugins on WordPress.com. These instructions are for self-hosted WordPress: i.e. you buy hosting (server space) from GoDaddy or someone else, and install WordPress’s free software there.

By Post Author

I set up a host through godaddy and installed wordpress through them but I don’t think I am now blogging through the host but through wordpress.com. I set up a word press account before I got a host. Could it be that I converted my blog to the free wordpress site and not the godaddy host? And if so do you have any idea if how to fix it?

One more thing it doesn’t seem to matter if I log in by going through the website wordpress.com or /wp-admin all my posts appear on both. Or is this still how you would blog using a domain through wordpress.com too?

OKay, to be sure, you’ll have to look at what the name servers are on your domain. I just looked them up, and they’re pointing to WordPress.com.

This means that the blog we see when we type in your URL is being served by WordPress.com. With a quick check, I see that if you go to your domain with wp-admin, it appears to redirect to the admin for the wordpress.com address. Look at the domain while you’re in wp-admin. What does it say?

To fix this, you’ll have to change your nameservers on the domain to your GoDaddy nameservers and probably re-import your blog content. (You could do this from the WordPress.com version of your site if you like how the importer worked there overall, or see if it does it better/differently by importing from Blogger again.)

HTH!

By Post Author

having problems with the “custom domain part”. can you email me?

Hi
I migrated three of my blogs using this guide about a year ago, I am planing to update my fourth blog so is there anything new, any quirk or a detail that’s different? (eg. the url format, redirections or else)

Also, I know how to do this, but maybe you can add a guide how to transfer an existing domain (for example I have a custom domain that points to my blogspot.com blog)to bluehost or any other hosting service…

I’m working on that now!

As far as I recall, everything is good. You’ll have to turn off the custom domain before you make the transfer. If ever you used a blogspot address for your site, after the transfer I’d recommend putting your blog back at that blogspot address, turning off search engines, and using the meta redirect above.

HTH!

By Post Author

thank you for the fast reply
just one more question the meta redirect doesn’t seem to work for me on either of the three previous blogs (it doesn’t really bother me all that much)
but visitors still get the blogger warning if they stumble on the old blogspot adress link somewhere, that they will be redirected to the new domain , of course after they click “go to…..”

Yeah, it’s redundant. It would only really work if you turn off the custom domain–but then the meta redirect would take visitors to the front page of the blog.

By Post Author

I am hoping you can help me. I just switched from blogger to WP 2 days ago. I went to update feedburner and so I now have my new feed address. I went to redirect on blogger and it tells me I have invalid characters in my address. I copied it directly from Feedburner…it will accept my Original feed address just not the new feed address…any ideas? or should I cancel that and try and redirect from my other feed address?

@ Tommy
I think that the only thing you should have done is change the source of the feed in feedburner “Edit Feed Details”> in “Original feed” you put the new custom domain feed (it should be something like this “www.yourblog.com/feed/” and that’s it.
no changes are needed in blogger.

@Jordan or Mamablogga or whoever runs this blog 🙂
question, I forgot about this, in blogger after migration what was the settings for the search engine visibility ON or OFF?

@Tammy—What Slavco said—if you were already using FeedBurner, you shouldn’t have to change the address in Blogger.

@Slavco—Turn it off (i.e. block them). While duplicate content probably isn’t going to be a big deal, this is an extra measure to prevent triggering that filter.

By Post Author

Great post, thanx
Do you know if the new website keeps the page rank? and if not how long does it take?

The short answer is yes, it should, but it might take a while.

The long answer is that the PageRank shown on Google’s toolbar isn’t updated constantly. It’s a snapshot of a rounded estimate of your page’s authority in the eyes of Google that could be months out of date.

By Post Author

Hi, may I ask, how much is hosting + domain in one year? It’s kind of expensive… thank.

When I bought my hosting, it was $165 for two years, or less than $7 a month. Domains typically run about $8-15/year.

By Post Author

With the help of this tutorial I’ve migrated from blogspot to self-hosted wordpress three months ago. And my old blogspot blog still ranks in Google – ranks better than my new site.

So, is it a smart idea to tell Blogger to stop letting the search engines index my blog, i.e. to change the ‘Let search engines find your blog’ blogspot option to ‘No’?

That depends on a couple things:

1. Were you using a custom domain before you made the switch, and now the Blogger version has the custom domain turned off? If yes, go ahead and block search engines.

2. Have you turned on Blogger’s Custom Domain on your old blog after the switch to your new one? If yes, block search engines. If no, turn on Custom Domain first to try to redirect the links you had to your old blog and help your new blog gain traffic.

By Post Author

[…] Click on Cached for each post, and copy and paste your blog posts into a Wordpad document, or whatever Word editor you use.   Save your images, and videos too if you have them. This will help you to take your content and host it on your own domain.  If Google does restore your blog and you want to host it on your own domain, the following are step by step instructions on how to do this, I suggest Mamablogga.com – The Ultimate Guide To Migrating From Blogger To WordPress […]

Hi,

Hopefully I didn’t miss this in the comments. I made the move from Blogger to WP. I purchased my domain months ago. I called GoDaddy, and they helped me to switch my nameservers as well as the IP addresses in my domain account. I’ve posted a couple of times through my WP dashboard, but when I type my domain into a browser bar I get my blogger. Sometimes it switches over, but other times it stalls and never shows my WP. Do I need to delete my Blogger? Is there something else I can do? Thanks so much for your help. This tutorial was simple to use.

YOU ARE MY HERO!!! I just transferred my blogger into wp with my own domain and it worked perfectly by following your directions! It was so easy and stress free! Thank you so, so, so much!

@Amanda—Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you. When I look at your nameservers, they don’t appear to point to Bluehost or Blogger. However, I do see your WordPress blog when I load the page. Did you do something to fix this in the mean time?

If it’s still not working for you, you might want to clear your cache (I had to do this recently—I was super frustrated b/c I couldn’t get a redirect to work, and the problem was all in my computer.)

If you used a custom domain on your Blogger blog, and the links to your old posts are working, you don’t need the Blogger blog for anything. You can delete it, or you can simply block search engines (under Settings, I believe).

HTH!

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Excellent write-up! This was exactly what I’ve been looking for in recent weeks.

I do have one question: I’d like to be able to migrate everything over from Blogger to my Bluehost/WP set up without it actually being publicly viewable until I’m ready.

The reason behind this is because I’m going to want to play around with some themes and the visual look of the new WP setup and I’d rather my readers have a clean transition without being able to see my constantly working on and tweaking things.

How can I make that happen?

Great idea. You can do this, but the methodology depends on whether you’re using a custom domain on your Blogger blog.

If you’re not using a custom domain, you can set up your new site using steps 1-6 and import either now or when you’re ready.

If you ARE using a custom domain on Blogger, I’d recommend setting up a test blog (at thisisatest.yoursite.com or something similar). Create the subdomain on your hosting service and install WordPress on it. Block search engines (under Settings>Privacy). You can even test the import of your posts here.

When you’ve got it how you want it, install WordPress on your main domain and copy the theme files. You might have to go through the settings panels one by one to transfer those, though.

There will be at least a little lag time during the actual transition, since you’ll have to switch nameservers to install WP and do your work, but it’ll be a lot less than if you were tinkering on your live blog.

Hope that helps!

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Hi
For some time now, like for a year or so I have my custom domain just forward to my blogspot address ( i tried using just custom domain but some images didn’t show like this)
So will it affect search engines and indexing if I transfer my blog to wordpress now?

Yeah, it probably will (though the steps in this tutorial minimize the effects). It looks like the site is using domain masking, which makes the URL of your site appear as hqwalls.com no matter what page you’re on. Search engines are a little smarter than browsers, so search engines have probably been using your blogspot address in their indexes and results. I did a quick Google search, and yeah, that looks to be the case. So follow the steps above as if you hadn’t used the domain.

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Hi
just one more question, is it OK to leave the page in both places for like a day or less to set everything right at the new domain, I mean at the wordpress blog?

hi, very informative blog. love it. i have some questions…

1. can i customize the theme (fixing widgets, etc) before importing posts and comments? so everything looks nice after the move? or should I customize it later? does it matter?

2. does wordpress blog automatically add the “read more” line to every post after the migration? what should i do if it doesn’t?

Thanks!

1. Yes, you can customize the theme & widgets before you import and move, but if you’re currently using a custom domain on Blogger, you’ll have to do this on a test blog on a subdomain. It’s nice to have it done first, but it might not be a huge deal if you don’t.

2. If you’re currently using the “jump breaks” in Blogger, the code to do this is the same in WordPress. If you’re cutting off your posts with a gadget or code in the blog, you’ll want to find a snippet plugin that works the way you want for WordPress.

Hope that helps!

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hey jordan,

1. im not using a custom domain on blogger so i’m good to go!! =D

2. okay, phew. im using the jump breaks.

one more question, i have seen many tutorials regarding migration to wordpress. Yours is simply the easiest to follow but this one plugin (from another tutorial) seems to help a lot since it brings over photos in your picasa album to wordpress.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-blogger-to-wordpress-301-redirector/

do you recommend me using this? if so, at which step in your tutorial?

thanks!!

@charmy

the plugin seems really nice I will test it to see what it can do
but don’t move the images from picasa to wordpress, because you will lose traffic related to image search.

^ please do slavco. my images, i don’t place emphasis on them and they’re named by number so not convenient for image search anyway!

let me know!! 😀

im a bit confused at step 3. after i clicked install wordpress, am I directed to my wordpress blog with username and pw? or do I have to go through the process off creating SLQ databases? sorry for the multiple questions. >.<

I see my cpanel…but im just confused of where to click.

You don’t have to create the MySQL databases; the scripts should take care of everything for you.

If I remember correctly, there might be a link you can click at the end of the install, or you can go to YourDomain.com/wp-login.php (or YourDomain.com/wordpress/wp-login.php or wherever you put it) to login to WordPress.

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hi again!

im a step before importing my post and comment. do I have to make a new feedburner account for the new wordpress blog?

also, when do i invite the other authors of my blog?

thanks a lot jordan!

I think it will work better if you invite the other authors before you import. I *believe* this will make it easier to keep the posts with the correct authors.

If you’re already using FeedBurner, no need to make a new address (I can see how that’s ambiguous in the article). You can use your same account. Just be sure to hit steps 4 and 7.

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Hi Jordan, first off thank you so for this helpful post!

i’ve finally given up on blogger after having hours’ worth of work lost by the ‘autosave’ feature (accidentally hit delete on text and images, then autosave wiped me out)

my questions…
1) images are integral to my blog, and I upload them straight to my blog…if I migrate my blog, will these transfer over? my concern is that i’m not uploading to picasa first, which may affect transportability
2) after I migrate, can I safely return to blogger if things don’t work correctly with the migration? I have a lot of unique work that if lost would literally devastate me…i know,i probably take it a little seriously 😉
3) is there a way to archive my blogger posts without actually going into each individual one and copying the html?

thank you so much for your help…i wish I’d known to use WP originally

That’s so frustrating! The same kind of thing happens from time with WordPress, too.

So, to answer your questions:

1. In my experience, Blogger automatically stores your pictures in Picasa whether you upload them there first or not. I know I recently came across a way to import your images into WordPress, too, so it’s definitely out there.

2. Yes. I recommend that you don’t delete your Blogger blog after migration, but either turn off search engines or turn on custom domain/redirection.

3. I’m not sure what you mean by archive your posts, but you can leave them there in the Blogger blog and import them using a WordPress utility. If all goes well, it takes like 5 clicks.

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Thank you so much for a wonderful tutorial! I gave you a shoutout in my first post on the new setup 🙂

I did want to let you know that I found a plugin that does do a better job of redirecting the posts to the new permalink.

The SEO Blogger to WordPress plug-in allows a redirect even if you use a different permalink structure – and it also has a single step to import your photos so that the featured images in your theme work. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-blogger-to-wordpress-301-redirector/

Thanks again – super post!

Oh, great! I’ll be sure to include that in the next edition (coming soon!).

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