Starting a blog has long been one of the most accessible entry points to owning and managing a website. For the most part, it was about the large number of free blogging services that make it easy to create and run a blog. Blogger was one of the oldest and most influential blogging platforms, often credited for fueling the early boom in the popularity of blogs.
If you have a blog on Blogger, you know that although a lot has changed in the more than two decades since its inception, the platform is still alive and kicking. Having a blog today gives you more opportunities than ever before; this might be one of the reasons you want to switch from Blogger to WordPress. That’s what we’re going to talk about here.
In this article you will learn:
Blogger still has a lot to offer as a blogging platform. First, it’s still free – you can let parent company Google handle the hosting. Blogger is a secure blogging platform – again the platform that takes care of everything. With WordPress, security is up to you, so you better find a good security plugin. In general, you can start blogging with Blogger much faster than with WordPress.
Unfortunately, you will soon realize that speed comes at a cost. For example, you will be bound by Blogger’s Terms of Service. You won’t have the option to make as much money as you can with a WordPress blog. You will also find that Blogger themes cannot be compared to WordPress themes.
That’s without going into how important plugins are for creating a blog that people will want to visit. No platform can beat WordPress when it comes to the number and variety of plugins.
To sum it up, WordPress lets you do more with your content on your own terms. If you’re serious about blogging, this should be reason enough to switch, despite the ongoing costs of running a WordPress blog. And if you’re convinced, let’s see how you can migrate your blog from Blogger to WordPress with as little damage as possible to your search engine rankings.
When migrating a website from any service to WordPress, you must first make sure you have a WordPress website ready to host your posts. It’s no different when migrating from Blogger to WordPress.
Even if you are not very experienced in website building, do not worry – setting up a WordPress blog is not that difficult. The main things to consider to include:
This should be enough to get you started. However, if you’re new to WordPress, you can take the time and familiarize yourself with the CMS, the page builders it has, and learn the ropes before moving on to migrating your blog. You should at least understand what add-ons are and how to install them.
The most labor-intensive way to transfer your content from Blogger to WordPress is to manually copy and paste. he. If you have a small website and aren’t keen on keeping comments, this might be a good option for you. In this case, all you have to do is go to your Blogger posts, copy the content, create a related WordPress blog post and paste the content.
If you want to automate the process at least a little, you must first create a copy of your content on Blogger. The great thing about the platform is that it lets you do this easily – just go to: Settings Swipe down from your Blogger dashboard Manage Blogand click on Backup content.
The backup comes in the form of an .xml file; which is great because this is the kind of file that WordPress’ Blogger importer loves. But this brings us to a problem.
While plugins are great as they allow us to do a lot of things with WordPress, they can become a problem for your website if left for too long without an update. WordPress’ Blogger ImporterAlthough it has over a hundred thousand active installations, it has not been updated and tested in a long time and has a three-star rating, which makes it an unreliable plugin to use.
You should always be careful when using outdated plugins. If you decide to use the Blogger Importer, go to: Tools > Import From your WordPress dashboard and install the importer.
After running, the plugin lets you choose the .xml backup file you want to use to import the blog post. Note that the plugin will not import pages, but images.
After selecting the file and starting the import, you will also have the option to choose the author of the blog posts when they appear on your new blog.
With this, I hope you complete the content import process.
If you don’t want to take any risks and want a maintained plugin – and you’re willing to pay for it – you should go ahead and download it. Blogger Importer Extended. The plugin is free to use for up to twenty posts or pages as it imports pages and also lets you set up 301 redirects right then and there.
Creating a Proper Permalink Structure
You want the permalink structure on your new blog to be as similar as possible to the permalink structure on your old blog. A blogger’s /year/month/postname.html structure. get over your head Settings > Permalinks Select Month and Name in WordPress.
You’ll notice that it’s very similar to the structure of Blogger’s permalinks. For an even better match, remove the trailing slash in the Custom Build option and replace it with .html.
Setting Redirects
If you used Blogger Importer Extended, you may have already set up the redirects. If you haven’t, now is the time to do it. You can use a useful plugin called Blogger to WordPress.
go Plugins > Add New From your WordPress dashboard to search, install and activate the plugin. Next, go to: Tools > Redirect from Blogger to WordPress, where the plugin will ask you to start the configuration. It will give you a list of blogs whose posts you have imported and will generate a piece of code that you need to add to your Blogger template after you hit the “Generate Code” button.
On your Blogger blog, you will need to switch your theme to the Classic theme as it will allow you to edit its HTML. Make sure to backup your current theme first, then paste the code from the plugin into your Blogger’s theme HTML and save the changes. Go back to your WordPress website and hit the blue “Verify Configuration” button. You will get a test case to check if everything is ok.
Let’s wrap it up!
Despite all its charm and nostalgic feel, Blogger can’t compete with the possibilities you get when you create your blog using a powerful CMS like WordPress. But the fact that WordPress might be a better fit for you than Blogger doesn’t mean you should throw away all your hard work in creating content for your Blogger blog. With a few smart choices, migrating your blog from Blogger to WordPress can get your content a new home and you don’t have to start a blog again.
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