Blogger is an easy blogging platform that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. WordPress is a powerful and flexible content management system (CMS) that allows users to customize the website appearance with themes and extend the functionality with plugins. Many users start with Blogger for the Google friendliness, but they quickly want to transfer to WordPress as they need full control over their blogs. This tutorial just comes to help readers who are struggling for Blogger to WordPress migration. Follow the detailed guide step by step, you can easily transfer your website without losing Google Rankings.
Preparations
Before to migrate, you are required to have a blank WordPress website so that your Blogger blog can transfer to. To build up a WordPress website, you should register a new domain name and sign up a WordPress hosting account to power the site. We have reviewed out a series of excellent WordPress hosting providers, which come with high performance services and offer special discounts and coupons for our readers. Especially, some of them even include a free domain name as bonus.
When registered domain name and signed up WordPress hosting account, you need to install WordPress on the new website. The process is quite easy, and we have written a detailed tutorial about How to Create a Blog with WordPress yet. If you get an account from BlueHost, you can refer to this tutorial to learn about WordPress installation.
Step 1: Import Blogger Posts Into WordPress
When everything is ready, you can start to import Blogger posts into WordPress at once. Login into your WordPress dashboard, go to Tools -> Import, and you can see the following systems that can import to WordPress.
Just feel free to choose Blogger. Then, it will pop up an Install Importer window, which introduces the Blogger Importer description. You can click the button of Install Now to set up the plugin, and WordPress will download and install it automatically.
Once installed the importer, you are asked to activate the plugin. Just do it. Then, you are needed to authorize WordPress to transfer Blogger posts. Click on the Authorize button on this page and it will link you to the Google account page, where the page prompts that WordPress is asked for permission to handle your Blogger account. You can simply click the Allow Access button to continue.
After then, you will be linked back to WordPress, and you can see the list of your Blogger accounts. Now, what you need to do is clicking on the import button and WordPress will automatically import it. Once completed, WordPress will ask you to set an author for the imported posts.
At present, you have successfully completed the Blogger to WordPress migration. However, you still need to make the following configuration to ensure that your visitors from the old blog can reach the new WordPress site and keep the search engine ranking reversed.
Step 2: Change the Permalink Structure
By default, WordPress generates URL like http://www.yourdomain.com?p=123. On the other hand, it gives users the ability to configure the URL friendly to readers and search engines by changing the permalink structure.
Back to your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings -> Permalinks, and you can see the common settings options as the below. Now, click the radio button for Custom Structure and enter the character of /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html into it.
In this case, the WordPress URL will match the structure on the old Blogger blog, which greatly ensure links working well and minimize the number of broken links.
Step 3: Redirect Blogger Visitors to New WordPress Site
Your old Blogger blog may have many monthly visits. How to inform these visitors about your new WordPress site and transfer them to the new site as well? In the following, we guide you to redirect visitors to the new site.
Login to the old Blogger blog, go to Settings -> Template, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on Revert to Classic Template link.
After that, you can see the Edit Template HTML area, where you are required to replace the entire content with the following code. Note that, you need to replace the http://www.yourdomain.com with your actual domain.
Now, your visitors from Blogger blog can be automatically linked to the new WordPress site. To test whether the redirection is working, you can search the Blogger blog and see if it brings you to the new URL.
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