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A week ago I published the first of three posts, dedicated entirely to moving from Blogger to WordPress. Before scrolling down, you might want to take a look at the previous article of the series: “Moving From Blogger to WordPress: Has the Time Finally Come?” Now that you have hopefully found out whether Blogger is good enough for you or you need WordPress, it is time to move on!
Today we are taking a look at the practical part i.e. how to actually transfer all of your blog posts into your shiny new WordPress installation and how to get rid of the problems that come with this.
How do You Import Your
Blogger Blog Posts?
Fortunately no – you don’t have to open up each and every post and copy/paste its content into WordPress. Importing your posts is actually the easy bit (although most of the explanations I found on the internet were making it look quite difficult).
Here are the steps you have to follow to migrate your posts to WordPress:
- First you need to install the “Blogger Importer” plug-in (download link)
- If you’ve bought a custom domain, you should remove it from your Blogger account
- Then you need to upload this PHP file to your WordPress’ theme directory (wp-content/themes/YOUR THEME NAME/)
- After that you need to revert your Blogger blog to the classic template
- Then scroll down to “Edit Template HTML” and paste that HTML code
- Now you have to find and replace all “http://www.reviewzntips.com” instances with the URL of your new WordPress blog
Alternatively here is video tutorial to show you how to that:
Credit for the PHP and the HTML files and the video goes to Labnol
What Permalink Structure
Should You Choose?
Now that we are finished with importing the blog posts, we need to take care of another important aspect. That is namely our blog’s link structure. You probably know what that structure in Blogger-powered blogs is but just in case:
http://BLOG NAME.blogspot.com/YEAR/MONTH/BLOG POST.html
EXAMPLE:
http://reviewzntips.blogspot.com/2012/11/online-business-problems.html
As you can see, the date of the post stands before the actual permalink (i.e. online-business-problems). This might not look bad for the visitor, but it isn’t ideal when it comes to search engines.
In Google’s eyes the more emphasize you’d like to put on a keyword, the closer that keyword should be to the beginning of the article, the headline or the URL.
That’s not what we have in the above example. What Google sees as more important in that Blogspot URL is the date of the post, which is obviously not what we need.
To fix this, you need to open up your WordPress dashboard, scroll down to “Settings” –> “Permalinks”, choose “Custom Structure” and put /%postname%/ in the field.
How to Fix the Broken Links?
One very annoying problem that occurs after importing your blog posts is that not one of your internal links will work.
Fortunately (once again!), there is a pretty neat plug-in that will do most of the hard work for you. The tool is Broken Link Checker (download link). Whenever you sign in to your dashboard the plugin starts searching for broken links. Once the search is finished, you can simply open the list of dead links and start editing. The good thing is you don’t have to edit each instance of the same link, since the changes apply to all identical URLs.
QUICK NOTE: In order to find as much links as possible, once you install the plug-in, go to Settings –> Link Checker –> Advanced and set the timeout (the first option) to 4 seconds.
How and Why You Should
Generate Post Thumbnails
Post thumbnails are used by all those plug-ins, dedicated to showing a list of related, recent, popular, etc. kind of articles either in your sidebar or under your blog posts.
Having one (I’d recommend all three) of those plug-ins is a great way to keep visitors just a little longer on your site. Allowing thumbnails to be shown generally improves click-through rates, since images are a far better way to catch one’s attention than simply using plain text (see four other reasons why blog post images are important: “4 Reasons to Add Images to Every Post You Publish“).
The problem with moving from Blogger to WordPress is that although your images will still be there, no thumbnails will be assigned to them hence the widgets won’t be able to display them.
Fixing the problem however is quite an easy task! The only tool you need is Auto Post Thumbnails (download link). Once you install it, you simply go to your WordPress dashboard –> Settings –> Auto Post Thumbnails –> Generate Thumbnails. The rest of the process is entirely automated.
From that Point On…
Now that you followed the above steps, you are pretty much done. What you need now are some great plugins to lighten up your WordPress blog! That is exactly what I am going to share with you in the third part of my “Moving from Blogger to WordPress” series!
Stay tuned!
Your Thoughts
Did you have problems when moving from Blogger to WordPress? Did you have any problems with the steps I overviewed in the above paragraphs? Do let me know your thoughts guys!
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Daniel, I am hoping to update the blogger importer for WordPress to handle the problem with internal links and also import the images which will are currently left on blogspot/picassa. In addition I use the redirection plugin to ensure that any external references to the old links get redirected to the correct posts.
Hey Daniel! Thanks for sharing! Only question I have is, did you lose any of your Facebook like counts, Twitter counts, etc., from your posts or do those somehow make this switch too?
Ok I have another question actually… You changed your permalinks from the ugly Blogger ones to the prettier domain.com/postname ones! I see that you laid out instructions for fixing your internal links, but now what about all the links from other sites or places? Do these redirect so that people get to the correct post (and you don’t lose your SEO juice)??? Let me know how you handled those, would ya please?
Thank you for the tips on how to do it. I myself started blogging on Blogger. I spent years on it, then I decided to move to WordPress. This also took me days to figure out how to do it. Now, my friend needs help and I can’t remember how I did it. Thanks to your post, I’ll simply send her this link. Thank you again!
Hi Daniel. What did you do with your old Blogspot? Did you leave it active with a link to your WordPress or just shut it down? Thanks. Lee
Hi want to know if it is possible and how to do the following
I will pass all the blog content from blogguer to wp
But I want to individualize each redirect as in:
On Blogger:
site.blogspot.com/2010/08/bad-nameee.html
And I want it to redirect to wordpress:
site.com/good-name.html
I’ve been trying to find out how to do this but have no clew so far
Can anyone help? Please?
Hey Ricardo,
Well I believe that this all comes down to changing the post’s slug. And I have actually covered that in this post http://www.reviewzntips.com/wordpress-seo-tips/. However you do this AFTER you import your posts, following the steps I covered in the post.
Do get in touch if you didn’t understand something!
Daniel
Hi Daniel
I didn’t even know I could “import” my blogger to WordPress… Very interesting. Not sure if I’m going to import or good old fashioned copy and paste but thank you very much for taking time to share this information with us less experienced n the field of blogging, and webbing!
Cheers x Shooting My Journey x
Nicol,
I believe importing would be by far the better option, since if you follow the techniques I went through, you will also be able to keep your backlinks and all those SEO-related things.
Daniel
Hi, Daniel! I appreciate your help to users like me, who decided to move from Blogger (finally!) but aren’t sure where to start with.
Actually, I got one more question to you (sorry if this is too much, but you are an expert and I would like to know your opinion). I have googled a tool called CMS2CMS – http://www.cms2cms.com that suggests ‘automated migration” from Blogger to WP. What attracted me is you basically do nothing, no codes and there are no broken links afterwards. Plus this thing moves all your stuff (except for design, which I in no way want to move, and extensions).
So, what’s your opinion about it? I really don’t feel I could cope with migration on my own…
Hey Maynai,
Well to be honest I haven’t stumbled upon that one before, so I am not all that sure how it works. One thing I’d advise you for sure though is to try this on a test blog and see if it works properly. You don’t want getting your content messed up for the few minutes that you will save with that approach.
Aside from the tool, I believe the whole migration process isn’t all that difficult. I thought it was when I had to do it but once I started it turned out it wasn’t such a pain.
Daniel
Thanks for your reply, Daniel! I didn’t realize there was a free Demo available for cms2cms. I tried and it migrate a couple posts – worked great, and the pleasant surprise was the youtube video I embedded in one of the posts, which was migrated too. So, I am going to move over to WP today with this tool, like – fully:).
Cheers!
Awesome to hear it worked for you Maynai. Will definitely take a closer look at the tool.
Moving from Blogger to WordPress is always a nightmare. I’ve been through it and almost all bloggers who start with a blogspot blog end up doing the same. No matter how carefully we research for the steps and do them, we always seem to miss something. A handy instruction like this is a great help!
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Hi Daniel, I’ve got my WordPress site and I’m ready to import my posts, but I’d like to be able to maintain the look and function of my blogger blog while I work on my WordPress site. Your instructions say that I’d need to revert my blogger blog to the classic template. Am I wrong in thinking that I would need to do some repairs to my blog to make it look ‘normal’ again (or at least, NOT a mess) while it is reverted?
Thanks!
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Hey Kristi,
Well the problem is your blog, won’t be accessible at all. The idea is to use a redirect, which will point your old Blogger blog directly to WordPress. Basically all traffic the enters the Blogger blog will be instantly directed to your new WordPress installation. That’s how it works if you want to keep your links and organic traffic.
Daniel
Aha, ok. I think I would like to use this method in the end (with the redirects) when I’m ready to open the site, but for now, I think I’ll play around with it a bit. Thank you so much.
You’re welcome!
A couple more questions. I’m very new at this, so forgive me if I’m asking dumb questions.
1. Besides the fact that it will take me time to build the site back up to what it looked like on Blogger, will the migration be seamless to my readers? Meaning, will my site be down at all, and for how long?
2. Will I keep my SEO/’google juice’ if I use your method? (Is that what you meant by links and organic traffic?)
3. If I use your method as listed under “How do You Import Your Blogger Blog Posts”, is there a chance that it will affect anything else besides my blog posts on the WordPress site?
4. Will my media that is presently stored on Picasa (through Blogger) be transferred and stored to WP, or will it remain on Picasa, and is that ok?
Thanks so much, Daniel.
Kristi recently posted…Farm Girl Blog Fest #31
No problem Kristi.
1. Well I don’t think there should be much of downtime except for a minute or two when the files are uploaded and the redirect is activated.
2. That is what I meant. The redirect you create in step one is what Google says a good way to keep the link juice when changing hosting and domains.
3. One problem that will arise is that your links will be broken if your WordPress blog uses a different URL structure. You could fix them with Broken Link Checker about which I talked about in the post.
4. Of that I really don’t know. But the fact it is stored through Blogger as you say worries me. It might not work.
Have a great weekend!
Daniel