Hello, Blogger friends. Few months ago I migrated my blog Techofy from blogger to WordPress. At that Time I faced too many issues, It was easy to migrate the post and pages using the WordPress plugin. But the real problem was redirecting everything properly to my new WordPress blog. Beside of Techofy, I have helped my many friends to migrate their blogs from Blogger to WordPress without any 404 errors.
The situation becomes worst when your Blogspot domain huge traffic and have some backlinks till this post there was no effective way to 301 redirect your Blogspot domain to the custom domain if you have Tons of post. Technically it is not possible to 301 blogger domain to custom domain hosted on WordPress but we can use Meta refresh to redirect them. Google considers Meta Redirect and 301 redirections the same thing. So you will not lose any rankings as well ass traffic.
After facing all the above issues, I decided to to write an article on Migration process. But technically I was also going to write the old stuff only. SO, I decided to make some Codes to redirect Blogspot domain as well as all other post, pages, categories. So, I made some codes and now you can perfectly redirect your blogger blog to WordPress.
I am assuming that you have Successfully installed WordPress on you Webhosting and Pointed your domain to your name servers. You should have access to your .htaccess file required for Redirection. Follow the article stepwise for best results.
Migrate All Your Posts, Pages and Categories (Labels) To Your WordPress Blog.
We will be using Blogger Importer Extended Wordpress plugin. It is the only running WordPress plugin to migrate post and pages from blogger. There is a manual method to do this but that method is Time consuming as well as not perfect.
Benefits Of Using Blogger Importer Extended.
Works after Google OAuth 2.0 update.
Preserves your Slugs (Custom Permalink of blogger posts). This will help us to remove some steps in the migration process.
Migrates all images to WordPress.
Migrate custom CSS, HTML in the posts.
Drawbacks Of Using Blogger Importer Extended.
I found the only drawback that is this plugin can migrate limited amount of Data from blogger to WordPress in 1 day and you can also not Resume the process to start from last stopped. The Plugin gets stuck when the limit is crossed. I found this problem while migrating 1 blog my friend having 13K Posts. The plugin was not able to migrate some images. But You do not need to take any tension about this if your Post count is less than 5K.
Follow The Steps To Use This Plugin To Migrate All The Contents.
1. Install Blogger Importer Extended to your WordPress blog.
2. Go To Tools >Importer there choose Blogger Importer Extend and click on “OK, let’s go!” Button.
3. Now click on “Accept” button to allow Blogger Importer Extend to migrate your blog.
4. Now select the Blog you want to Migrate from Blogger from the list of your blogs.
5. Now You will get the option to Start import option. Click on “Start Import” Button to start the process. Make sure you are going with all default setting don’t make any changes.
6. After doing the above step migration will start. It may take some type to migrate blog depending on the number of posts and images.
Now, You have successfully migrated your posts, pages, and categories properly. Now Its time to move to next step.
Decide and Setup Proper Permalink Structure.
After Moving to WordPress, You get many options of permalinks. You can choose any depending upon you requirements. Now You have two options to that you can use old Blogger permalink or any other permalink structure.
Do You Want To Use Blogger Permalink Structure?
If, Your Answer is Yes then go to Settings > Permalinks there choose custom permalink structure and paste the bellow code and then save that option. I am not using this permalink structure on Techofy and it recommended to change your permalink structure.
It will look like this.
If, You answer is no then Follow this Great Article By Yoast on How to change the permalink structure of WordPress blog.
Redirecting All Your Links to New WordPress Site.
After doing above steps you have your content ready on your WordPress Blog, but if you check properly you will be facing too many 404 errors. Your Old categories links, archive pages, mobile site, feeds all are going to a 404 page. To solve these issues, you will be using the bellow codes to redirect them to new links. The bellow code will redirect everything with 301 permanently moved tags so it is good for SEO also.
Paste The Bellow Code to starting off you .htaccess file.
Note Above code is taken from rtCamp and slight modification has been done by me.
Note: Some time WordPress automatically removes above codes from .htaccess file so you need to change the file permissions of your .htaccess file so that WordPress can not modify the file automatically. This problem mostly happens on VPS server and sometimes on shared hosting also.
What Above Codes Do?
They will redirect your old Archive pages to new pages.
They will redirect your old Categories pages to new pages.
They Will redirect all your Feeds.
They will redirect your mobile blog.
Don’t Forget To Convert Tags To Categories.
When you migrated data from your Blogger blog WordPress the plugin migrates your categories as Tags in WordPress. So, We Need to convert it back to Categories otherwise your categories will give 404 errors and SEO wise also it is good to use categories.
It is simple to do it. Just Go to Tools > Import. On that page, you will get an option to install a plugin named as “Categories and Tags Converter“. Click on the link Install the plugin and convert your Tags to Categories.
Install Smart 404 plugin.
Even after adding above code you will face some 404 errors, especially from your pages. For this reason, we will install Smart 404 plugin on our blog. When a user opens a link which is not in your database then this plugin will search for the most similar link and redirect the user to this relevant link. The plugin works within the fraction of seconds so users don’t come to know what happened. The redirection type is 301 so no issue of SEO.
Install Smart 404.
Now You have Successfully redirected everything and I Guarantee you that you will not face single 404 issue if everything is working fine.
301 Redirect Your Blogspot Domain to Your Custom Domain Hosted on WordPress.
When you change your domain from blogger to any other service when you open the .blogspot domain of your site it shows a error saying that
“You’re about to be redirected
The blog that used to be here is now at (YOUR WEBSITE URL)
Do you wish to be redirected?
This blog is not hosted by Blogger and has not been checked for spam, viruses and other forms of malware.”
Now, I will tell how to avoid this error and 301 redirect whole Blogspot domain to Custom domain on WordPress. To solve the above error and redirection purpose I have written a small piece of code which will help us in this situation.
Follow the steps properly.
1. Go To Blogger and then Move to Settings > Basic. On this page under Publish settings. Your domain will be added there. Click on X button to remove your Custom blogger domain from blogger.
3. Once the above step is done move to Template and Click On “Edit HTML” Button. Replace all the codes of Editor with the bellow code. This code will help you to Redirect your Blogspot domain to the new WordPress site. This code will redirect You posts and pages, categories, archive and all other pages.
Note: Above Code Is Written By Me, So if you are going to use this code In your post then don’t forget to give a Backlink to this blog.
3. Make sure that Mobile Template is disabled on your blogger blog otherwise above code will not work for Mobile users and they will not be redirected to your WordPress blog.
A big Thanks goes to my Friend Devang Nagda from Techkshetra for testing the code and making it perfect.
Above code uses Meta Refresh to redirect you Blogspot content to WordPress blog so you will never lose your backlinks and traffic because Google considers 0 Second Meta refresh as same as 301 redirect and we all know the power of 301 redirection.
Successfully Migrated !!!
If you followed the above steps properly, You must have migrated your Blogger blog to WordPress with all things redirecting properly. It time to enjoy WordPress have tons of plugins to automate most of the works.
If you face any Issue or doubt while migrating you blog Comment bellow, I will try my best to resolve it. Else you can shoot an Email to info@techofy.org
The post How To Perfectly Migrate Blogger Blog To WordPress 2015 appeared first on Techofy.