As we know that blogger is one of the most popular blogging platforms which gain very quick attraction among those wanting to begin blogging for the very first time. As it cost nothing to begin a website/blog, blogger made a very simple entrance to blogging for everybody. A couple of years back especially, it was all the rage, everything was blogging around Blogger. Blogger was eventually acquired by Google.
We remember the time when we used to run a blog on Blogger, we will not share the URL though, we are somewhat embarrassed of those previous days.
Although, Blogger has a broad set of functions and features for a novice blogger, it may not be a perfect match for everyone particularly for people who need a blog with advanced customization choices.
Therefore as you grow being a blogger, you may like to move your own blog from Blogger to WordPress. Shifting your blogging stage can be scary. Nobody likes to risk losing their hard earned visitors and search engine position while migrating your blog from Blogger to WordPress.. Inside this article guides you about how to migrate a blog from blogger to WordPress step by step method during custom wordpress development without losing visitors and search engine juice.
Goals:
Import Blogger articles/blogs/posts and pictures to WordPress self-hosted blog
Keep same URL for articles/posts
Maintain search engine position by redirecting traffic from the old blog to the new blog
NB:Try this to a development environment initially to be sure you have received the nitty gritty info right. You do not want to crash and burn off in the middle of the migration. Do not rush this, think it through well.
Step #1: Install WordPress on your host
In case you did not establish a customized domain on your Blogger blog, then you have to install WordPress on your own host as the very first step. These days, every leading hosting websites support one-click installation of WordPress. So this step must not be that hard.
We’re hosted on and recommend InMotion as being a web hosting platform for your own WordPress.
If you did establish a customized domain, you will require to install WordPress on a temporary URL on your own host & modify the DNS settings after the complete migration, any wordpress development company can help to do this for you. As setting temporary URL differs for every host, you’ll need to look for the hosting company’s guide for this.
Usually, this involves going into the DNS Zone Editor
Step #2: Import data from Blogger to WordPress
Before importing data to WordPress, ensure that your permalinks are same to the Blogger permalink structure.
In your WordPress dashboard, click on Settings → Permalinks → and select customized structure.
Add this value “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html” to the custom structure field and save it.
After specifying the permalinks structure, you can begin importing data from Blogger. Automatically, WordPress comes with an integrated tool for copying data from Blogger.
In your WP dashboard, visit Tools → Import → Install. When you installed the importer plugin, then you have to activate it and run the importer. WordPress will subsequently request your permission to control your Blogger account.
Click ‘allow access’.
If you’re running more than 1 blog, choose which blog you’d love to import to the WordPress. Once you’re done, you can observe the posts, categories, and comments have been imported to the WordPress.
Step #3: Making WordPress permalinks seem identical to Blogger
If you attentively studied the permalinks of the posts you imported to WordPress, you will observe that the arrangement of blogger permalinks and WP permalinks are same, but still the post URL is identical. Since our aim while migrating is really to not lose the visitors or search rankings, we will want to make the URL structure look just the same even after the migration.
Use the following steps to create the WordPress permalinks look like Blogger. Insert the following code to a PHP file and then save it as fix.php. Then, upload into the root directory.
<?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"; ?>Step #4: Import gadgets and redirect the pages
By default WordPress importer can’t import both the gadgets and the pages from the Blogger. That means you will need to import both gadgets and pages manually just by copying and pasting the code into the WordPress.
As you are able to observe, in both the platforms the URL structures of the webpages are quite different. However, right after copying the pages to WordPress you can make use of the WordPress redirection plug-in for manually redirecting the pages without even losing the visitors.
In other words, before migration here is how the URL of the page will look like on Blogger: http://example.com/p/page
Using the redirection plug-in, the above mentioned URL can be redirected into the following page URL: http://example.com/page
Step #5: Redirect the blogger post URL into the exact WordPress blog posts
Till now, you have imported your entire Blogger blog posts, gadgets and pages to the WordPress host, and also successfully redirected all of the Blogger pages to WP pages. That is fantastic!
Even though, all the pages and posts of your customized domain are redirecting to the exact page, you are able to still see the default blogspot URL is not successfully redirecting to the exact URL. That is, ‘example.blogspot.com/blog-post’ isn’t currently redirecting to ‘CustomDomain.com/blog-post’ but to the homepage. Hence the focus of this step is to set up a 1-to-1 mapping among the blogspot posts to your WP posts.
Install this plug-in and activate it. After that, follow the plug-in setup guide given below.
Step 1: Under Tools, click on Blogger to WordPress Redirection.
Step 2: Now you will observe the configuration web page of the plug-in. Click on ‘start configuration’.
Step 3: Click get code. Now, you will get a template code which has to be added into your Blogger template.
Step 4: Copy the code and then paste it into your Blogger template. Then, just click save template.
Step 5: Return to the WordPress dashboard and then click verify configuration.
Congrats! You have not redirected your blogspot URL into the exact WordPress posts.
Step #6: .htaccess tweak
To redirect archive files, insert the following code into your 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]If you did not set the customized domain on your own Blogger blog, you can see your previous blog is now successfully redirecting to WordPress. If you did set customized domain, you are able to modify the temporary URL to the actual URL, and modify the DNS configurations accordingly.
And that is it – you must currently have been able to migrate your own blogger WordPress whilst maintaining the aims at the very top of the post!
