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.