As promised, here’s Part 2 of How To Move from Blogger to WordPress. In Part 1, we discussed about the requirements, preparing your WordPress blog and importing the Blogger content to your WordPress blog. This time, we’ll talk about how to set up the permalinks, setting up your blog’s appearance, setting up the custom domain (if you have one) and the rest of the steps that will help you move your blog from Blogger to WordPress.

Now, lets continue…

Setting up the Permalinks

1. Change the permalink settings by going to Settings > Permalinks and entering the custom permalink as shown below. If you are a careful observer, you should notice that Blogger’s permalinks is different to that of WordPress. It is important to map the new permalinks to the old Blogger’s posts – again, so that search engines would not penalize your blog for duplicate content.

2. Even if you had changed the permalink format in Settings > Permalinks, this is not enough. Some permalinks don’t show up correctly, like the one below: Blogger’s permalinks are always truncated!

Blogger’s truncated permalink

WordPress’s full permalink when custom structure /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html is applied

To solve this truncation problem, I used Maintain Blogger Permalinks plugin. This plugin saved me time from manually modifying those posts to make it similar to Blogger’s permalinks. The step-by-step instructions for using this plugin are written on Maintain Permalinks moving from Blogger to WordPress and the download link is provided along those steps.

Setting up Your Blog’s Appearance

1. If you wish to use another theme, upload the theme via FTP into wp-content/themes folder. Once that the theme is uploaded, activate it via Appearance > Themes.

2. Install all the plugins that you wish to use with your blog. Some recommended plugins are Akismet (for catching spam) and WP-DBManager (for automatically create scheduled backups of the entire blog).

3. Make all the necessary tweaks that you need to put into your blog by adding widgets, installing site analytics code, etc.

Setting up the Custom Domain

(Skip this step if you are not using a custom domain)
1. If you wish to use a custom domain (which is highly recommended), get back to your web host and link the subfolder to your domain. In Fatcow’s Cpanel in this example, I am trying to connect http://testsite.fatcow.com/singleparent via the Domain Pointing Manager. Different CPanels have different instructions on how to configure this one.

2. Again, for those who are using custom domains, change the nameservers configured for your custom domain. The nameservers are given by the webhost and these are needed to be entered into the domain manager. In my case, I had to take the nameservers from Fatcow and enter them into my GoDaddy’s domain manager. If you are using the old Blogspot URL, you may have to add its URL under Forwarding using 301 redirect. You may have to wait up to 24 hours to see the change. While waiting for this one, you may want to do the next step.

3. Since you have built some content and credibility on your old Blogger blog, you don’t have to delete it. You can use it to host existing images, which is actually what I exactly did. Another very important purpose is for retaining the old Blogger address while using the new custom domain. To make this possible I had to install another plugin called Blogger Redirector and set the custom domain in Blogger, as seen on the screenshot below:

I have it working right now on my freelance blog, try typing http://theladyprogrammer.blogspot.com and it will prompt you to the new URL.

4. Once that you are able to see the new WordPress blog, you can now let search engines visit it. Do that by changing Settings > Privacy and choose “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers”.

5. Get back to your old Blogger blog dashboard and turn off the capability for search engines to crawl it. Go to Settings > Basic and set “Let Search Engines find your Blog” to NO.

Hope that you liked this 2-part comprehensive guide on how to move from Blogger to WordPress and that it will help you make that transition easier.

This is a guest post by Gemma Baltazar of The Lady Programmer. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Since I got the chance to be given a free web host and host my own WordPress blog, I was jumping up and down with joy. I would finally get to have my own self-hosted WordPress blog and have full control over the way that I want to with my own blog!

Requirements Needed Before Moving from Blogger to WordPress

If you want to really make that move from Blogger to WordPress, you need to prepare for the following first:

• At least one backup of your Blogger blog. You might want to have two or more copies of the backup, just in case. Backup in blogger is done using Export Tool, and here’s How to Export an Existing Blog.
• A web host. Chances are you need to pay one to host your blog. There are those free services that are almost unreliable: they put your blog offline after getting a good traffic. Paid services are almost always a better way to host your blog. I use 1and1 to host my own freelance blog – if you are interested, you can sign up for an account with them).
• (optional) Own domain. Although your web host can give you their own subdomain, it is always better to have your own domain. Many paid web host services also offer free domain registration on their packages. Would you like readers to access a site named s12345.samplehost.com or the one with the name www.theladyprogrammer.com?
• (optional) A WordPress theme. You can use those default Kubrick and Classic themes that come with each WordPress installation or you can dress it up with a theme to make your blog look interesting. There are various WordPress theme reviews on this blog and you might want to choose from one of these. Make the decision early because there are many plugins that require theme modifications.
• (optional) A recent post announcing your move. If you have a huge reader base, it is often wise to post this announcement.

Step by Step Instructions on Moving Blogger to WordPress

Once that you have everything above prepared, you can now proceed with the step-by-step instructions I had outlined below:

Preparing your WordPress Blog

1. Get into your webhost’s Cpanel and install WordPress. Most web hosting services provide autoinstaller scripts like Fantastico which show wizard-type interfaces that are very easy to follow. If for some reason you really need to do a manual installation, there’s more on this WordPress.org’s documentation on Installing WordPress.

2. Upgrade your blog to the most recent version of WordPress, if you see the message below. Click “Please update now” just beside “WordPress 2.7.1 is available!” to start the upgrade process. This helps avoid security issues associated with WordPress blogs.

3. Clean up all the sample data in your new WordPress installation. Those sample data are: a post, a page, an approved comment and some blogroll links. You cannot remove “Uncategorized” category, so leave it as is.

Sample data generated after installing WordPress

Sample blogroll links generated after installing WordPress

4. Set your WordPress blog’s Privacy Settings by going to Settings > Privacy, then select “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”. This setting is just temporary: it is to prevent duplicate content penalty in search engines, so your blog visitors from search engines can still easily visit your blog.

Importing the WordPress Blog

1. Go to Tools > Import then click Blogger to initiate the import from your Blogger blog. Click the Authorize and Grant Access when Google Access Request appears.

2. You will be asked to choose which blog to import posts and comments from. Click the Import button to start the process. This will take a while, depending on the length of your blog. If the import is done, the Import button changes to Set Author. Click Set Author.

3. The next screen asks you to map the Blogger author to the WordPress author. This step is essential especially if you have a multi-authored blog. Since I am the only author of my Blogger blog, I just have to simply click Save Changes.

4. If the import is successful, you should be able to view all your posts and comments.

That’s it for Part 1 of HowTo: Move From Blogger to WordPress. Next week, we’ll continue this tutorial and Part 2 will talk about setting up the permalinks, setting up the blog’s appearance, setting up the custom domain and the rest of this comprehensive guide so watch out for it. If you don’t want to miss part 2, make sure you subscribe to JaypeeOnline’s RSS feed.

UPDATE: How To Move from Blogger to WordPress Part 2