Guide to Move From Blogger to WordPress Without Losing Traffic

Are you contemplating within you to move your Blogger/Blogspot blog to WordPress? I’ve also been in the same boat as you. I used blogger in the past 2 years and I can say with no doubt that Blogspot / blogger is one of the best blogging platforms for new bloggers. I moved this blog from Blogger to WordPress last month. After the migration, many people have been asking me why I left Blogger and the processes I went through.

I’ve already written two posts that give answer to the reason why I left Blogger for WordPress, the two posts are: Benefits of Using Blogger over WordPress and Benefits of Using WordPress over Blogger. So today, I will be share a do-it-yourself (DIY) Blogger to WordPress migration guide to help you through the process of moving your blog from Blogger to WordPress without losing any traffic and SEO.

Before the migration begins, here are some of our goals:

1. To import all posts, comments and pages to WordPress.
2. Retaining all feed subscribers, posts Facebook likes and Tweets.
3. Maintaining permalinks for posts & pages i.e. 1-on-1 mapping between Blogger.com and WordPress pages
4. Retaining traffic and google page rank

Now that our goals are clearly stated, next you need to understand the differences between having a Blogger.com blog on a subdomain and on a custom-domain. Two different cases are:

1. Blog with a subdomain address – e.g. http://example.blogspot.com
2. Blog with a custom domain address – e.g. http://example.com

If your blog is using a subdomain address, it might be a bit difficult achieving all the four goals set above. So for the subdomain case, the best solution is to – setup custom domain on Blogger.com to be able to achieve all the goals.

Now let’s get the migration started… at this point, I assume you have:

• Your blog on Blogger has a custom domain address
• You have a webhosting where you can install WordPress
• Finally, you can access your domain’s DNS records.

Blogger to WordPress Migration Begins

1. Set your DNS entries to point to your hosting account and Install WordPress. You can easily install WordPress using the auto installer on your cPanel. Login to your cPanel and locate WordPress one-click installer provided by your web host.

2. From WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings -> Permalinks and select Custom Structure option and paste the following value next to it and save changes.

You need to do this to make your WordPress blog’s permalink structure looks like Blogger.

3. The next point of action is to import your Blogger posts to WordPress. To achieve this, go to Tools -> Import options and select Blogger options. A pop-up box will appear, click on Install Plugin to install the importer plugin in WordPress

4. Click on Activate Plugin & Run Importer. You’re asked to grant access to your google account. Click on Grant Access and you may be prompted to login to your google account if you’re not already signed in.

5. Once you grant access, you will be taken back to the Blogger importer on WordPress. If you have more than one blog on your Blogger account, you will see all of them listed here. Just click on the import button next to the blog that you want to import into WordPress

6. Once you click import, all posts and comments from Blogger.com blog start importing into WordPress. Importer may stop in between. In that case, the text on the button will change from Import to Continue. Keep clicking on it, until the button-text changes to Set Authors, which indicates all posts and comments have been successfully imported. 
(NOTE:WordPress Importer does not import the pages from your Blogger.com blog, You have to do this manually.)

At this juncture, your Blogger.com blog is completely imported. But wait, your images hosted on Blogger’s server are still on there so don’t delete your Blogger.com blog.

Fixing Permalinks

In step 2 above, I mentioned that the WordPress permalinks should be configured to look like Blogger permalinks. Now, we need to make both look identical to keep traffic, SEO and achieve our goals.

Look at the WordPress post link below:

http://www.justnaira.com/2013/08/welcome-to-wordpress-this-is-your-first-post-edit-or-delete-it-then-start-blogging.html

And the following blogger.com post link for the same post:

http://www.justnaira.com/2013/08/welcome-to-wordpress-this-is-your-first.html

Both permalinks have the same structure but the slug is different and we must make it look exactly like it was on blogger in order to make search traffic point to that very blog post instead of your visitors getting Error 404 (Not Found).

Copy the code below to a notepad and save it as blogger.php

<?php
require_once('wp-load.php');
$res = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT post_id, meta_value FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key = 'blogger_permalink'");
$wpdb->print_error();
foreach ($res as $row){
$slug = explode("/",$row->meta_value);
$slug = explode(".",$slug[3]);
$wpdb->query("UPDATE $wpdb->posts SET post_name ='" . $slug[0] . "' WHERE ID = $row->post_id");
$wpdb->print_error();
}
echo "DONE";
?>

Now upload this to your public_html or the folder in which your wordpress blog is installed. Run the script like this: http://your-blog.com/blogger.php

On executing this script, the only output you must see is “DONE”. At this point, check the post links on your WordPress blog. Their path part must now be identical to Blogger.com post link.

Moving Your Blogger Feed Subscribers Over To WordPress

 If you are using Feedburner, update source feed URL as it will be changed with migration. Just use the .htaccess hack below to fix URL of your feed.

Just add following lines at the top of your .htaccess file which can be found in root directory of your WordPress installation.

#ATOM Feeds
RewriteRule atom.xml feed/atom/ [L,R=301]
RewriteRule feeds/posts/default feed/atom/ [L,R=301]
#RSS FEEDS
RewriteRule feeds/posts/default?alt=rss feed/ [L,R=301]
RewriteRule rss.xml feed/ [L,R=301]
#Comments Feed
RewriteRule /feeds/comments/default  comments/feed/  [L,R=301]
RewriteRule /feeds/comments/default?alt=rss comments/feed/  [L,R=301]

OR You can simply add new WordPress feed URL, inside blogger dashboard -> Settings -> Site Feed under Post Feed Redirect URL and then click on Save Settings.

Handling Your Blogger labels/archive pages

After the whole installation, your blogger labels/archive pages will be redirected to your WordPress 404 page. To avoid this, add the following code into the .htaccess file:

#Redirect archives
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{1,2})_([0-9]{1,2})_archive.html$ $1/$2/ [L,R=301]
#Redirect labels/categories
RewriteRule ^search/label/(.*)$ category/$1/ [L,R=301]

Removing Your Old blogspot Site from Google Index

Like I earlier said, never delete your Blogger blog. Your images are still hosted on blogger. To avoid duplicate content and google penalty, you must remove your blogspot site from google index by pasting the code below in the head section of your blog.

<meta content='NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW' name='ROBOTS'/>

Enjoy WordPress!

You can also hire me to migrate your blogger blog to wordpress.