HowTo: Move from Blogger to WordPress Part II

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.

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.

WordPress Permalinks Settings

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
Blogger Truncated Permalink

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

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.

GoDaddy Domain Manager

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:

Blogger Advance Settings

I have it working right now on my freelance blog, try typing https://www.ladyprogrammer.net/ 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.

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13 Comments

  1. Excellent Article. Very well explained.

    But one thing I didn’t understand here, that why did you use “Blogger Redirect” plugin and left your custom domain set on blogger? when you’ve already set the name servers to your webhost (of new wordpress blog).

    When a visitor wants to visit your blog why on earth would he enter your xxx.blogspot.com URL? when he can just enter your mycustomdomain.com and see your wordpress blog directly?

    I really didn’t understand the purpose of this redirect plugin.

    When I started by blogger blog I immediately set a custom on it, so nobody never knew what’s my xxx.blogspot.com URL… So do I still have to install this redirect plugin? Will just changing name servers will do in my case?

  2. wow! this is the tutorial the many of us here were so excited to read and learn.

    @gem: now, you and jaypee are really giving us no reasons to move to wp? ehehehe… thanks for the great help. this article should become my guide eventually.

  3. Hi Gem, and to think I just started at blogger :) but since I still have so much to learn really in blogging, I figure out I will just start from blogger first knowing that I can always import my materials to wordpress or to anywhere else.

    1. @betchai – Great to see you here. I see you have a new blog in blogger and with its own domain too (which is far better than starting your blog with a blogspot domain). I hope I get to see the time when you finally want to switch to self-hosted WordPress. If you really need to make the move and need some help, let me know.

  4. Thanks for this excellent post – I have followed it through to the end – but just wanted to ask if I need to delete my posts at blogger. I have set "Let Search Engines find your Blog” to NO.

    1. @Janet – Oh, you don't need to delete your posts at Blogger. I still use my old Blogger blog to host the images that are associated with my old blogger account, plus, it provides me the redirection that I need – useful when bloggers still link up to your blog or individual blog posts using the blogspot.com domain – such as what I've experienced in my blog.

  5. @Roy – You’re welcome! Its okay if you read the guide/tutorial several times. Its always better to be sure than do it in a hurry and end up messing your blog, right?

    Wish you all the best and that your move from Blogger to WordPress would be a smooth one. Thanks for stopping by and sharing! :)

  6. @jhay – Gem did a very good job with this comprehensive guide. I’ve totally abandoned my Blogger account but I still have access to it so if I find use for it later, I can still use it.

    Btw, when can I expect your first guest post here? ;)

  7. thanks! although i still need to go back and re-read (and re-read again) for me to get that redirecting thing.

    am moving my blogger accounts anytime soon.

    thanks!

  8. A nice and thorough finish to the series. I'm using a script to redirect my blogger blogs to my main WP-powered blog, but I forgot where I got that script from. It's been 4 years already!

  9. Gem, I have a strange feeling this valuable post will prove very useful to me anytime soon. Tweeted and bookmarked just like the first installment.

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