How to Migrate Blogger to WordPress

Move your Blogger site to WordPress without losing visitors

The truth is that WordPress is growing throughout the world, and not by chance: it is the CMS platform that has had the most development over time; the safest, the fastest, the most versatile and powerful. For this, Many admins have already decided to move their Blogger to WP, and those who have not yet are seriously evaluating it.. If this is your case, you have come to the right place because we are going to explain how to perform the migration, step by step.

Blogger limitations

blogging it is a reliable solution, and we cannot say otherwise. Of course, this is followed by a 'but': the truth is that its benefits are limited to fundamental aspects concerning the publication of entries, turning out that it has a ceiling: if your blog is growing, and if you intend to expand its content to the profitable dimension, you will realize that you need to migrate to WordPress your content so it can keep scaling.

As if that were not enough, in Blogger you are not really the owner of your content, since it is a service provided by Google and under its rules (comparable to Youtube: who really owns a video uploaded there?). While Blogger is a handy service for bloggers just starting out, including small sites and users who view their page as a mere Hobbie casual, It is not recommended for demanding users or projects that really want to grow.

The advantages of WordPress

In addition to being gratuitous and have the largest user community on the planet (of course, if 60,000,0000 sites in the world use WordPress), its greatest benefits are the following:

• You can host it wherever you want (Although we always recommend preferably a hosting optimized for WordPress). By "wherever you want" we mean with the company and plan that you like, and in the country you like (remember that hosting on servers close to the source of the actual site traffic improves the browsing experience, at least initially).
• exist hundreds of free professional themes, and thousands of other payments in a variety of prices starting at USD5. This will allow you to 'dress' your site exactly how you need it.
• exist thousands of free components, highly professional, that will allow you to easily materialize your ideas (however specific they may be). Write something you want to do in the plugin search inside your WordPress, and you will be surprised because at least there will be five components that will carry out what you want, if not a hundred.
• All components and themes are activated or deactivated with one click. This injects versatility and immediacy into your projects, allowing you to 'play' with your site and run tests, evaluating adjustments on the spot.
• WordPress is lightweight, but that doesn't stop it from providing the most inclusive experience for your users, with all the tools you really need, exactly how you need them.

What does it mean to migrate my Blogger to a site developed in WordPress

First, the obvious: you need to move your tickets. But, in addition, no other type of content should be discarded: pages, content structure, images, photographs and any other resources.

You probably also want your WordPress site retains the aesthetic features of Blogger (Unless—why not?—you take the opportunity to revamp your content design). However, if what you want in the first stage is to respect the general aesthetic orchestration, don't worry, we also cover this aspect in this guide.

First step: the web hosting

The first step is to find a hosting service with WordPress support. You can install WordPress on any server: it is enough for the company to give you the FTP access credentials so that you can upload the installation files to the server. WordPress is free, and its files can be downloaded from WordPress.com; nevertheless, To avoid problems and speed up the process, hosting with cPanel and optimized for WordPress is recommended.. A company that provides you with the online tools of cPanel (eg Duplika, we can't hide it) makes it easy for you to install WordPress with one click. Also, if that company has optimized their server to run this CMS, your site will have even more resources (and faster speed).

Then, the first step is to hire a hosting service, and the second (although they could be done the other way around) is buy a domain.

The domain, as you already know, is the URL or web address of your site. The domain of our Duplika company is duplika.com

If you don't already have your own domain, consider whether an extension is best .com or regional; if you are located in Argentina, you may want to evaluate the extension .com.ar

If you have doubts about this, or you don't know how and where to acquire your own domain, please don't hesitate to write us in the comments or at [email protected]

If you consider moving with us, don't worry because we do it for free and we'll take care of everything

Hereinafter, This guide will assume that you already have a new domain with a working WordPress installation..

Second step: export my Blogger

This step should be easy since Blogger allows you to export your blog as a backup.

The backup of your blog will be downloaded from Blogger in a single file, in .XML format, typical of this type of backup.

To download your blog in XML go to your Blogger Dashboard and then click on Settings > Others as we show you in the screenshot below:

Hit the button marked, “Create a Content Backup.” A confirmation popup screen will appear.

Once you have pressed the “Save to your computer” button, the file with the XML extension will begin to download. It is then time to import said file to our new WordPress installation.

Third Step: Import Blogger into WordPress

WordPress makes it easy for you: gives you its own tool to do this seamlessly. As the screenshot below indicates, go to Tools > Import and install the corresponding tool by selecting the 'Install Now' link.

After clicking on “Run the importer”, the corresponding tool will open on the screen. The first thing is to select the XML file that we had downloaded from our Blogger by pressing Browse and searching for the file on our computer. Once this is done, we will click on "Upload file and import".

WordPress will upload the XML file to the server, thereby retrieving your existing Blogger posts.

It is VERY unlikely that your XML file will be larger than 256MB, but if this is the case, you will need to increase your WordPress file upload limit by editing your site's root file called .htaccess

In this file you must add the following lines:

php_value upload_max_filesize 128M php_value post_max_size 256M php_value memory_limit 512M

With this edit done, try uploading your file again, and remember that if you run into a problem like this —or another—, and you're hosting your WordPress site with us, you can contact support so we can resolve it for you without a hitch.

Fourth step: retrieving the authors of the posts

In the next step, WordPress will want to know which author you want to assign the posts to. It is necessary that you have in your WordPress the profile of each author created if you intend to relate it to the content of each specific post.

Remember that users in WordPress are created here:

On the Blogger import screen, once the XML file has been read, the window will display the following dialog:

Here we can manage and verify that the entries imported from Blogger will be correctly assigned to our users in WordPress. If in this step we want to make changes (modify an old user for another) we are allowed to do so since for each user in Blogger we can assign one in WordPress. Easy.

The “Send” button, now yes, will process the XML file generating the entries in our WordPress and assigning the correct author.

We can verify that everything has gone well by going to the section of our entries as we show you in the screenshot below:

Optional step: if —in addition to posts— I have created pages in Blogger, how do I move them?

If in addition to posts, you have created pages in Blogger, you will need to move them separately, and this is done copying and pasting the HTML code manually. Go back to your Blogger desktop and click on the “pages” tab.

For each page you've created in Blogger, you'll need to click on it to enter its edit, and once inside the edit, you need to select HTML mode, like so:

When you see the HTML code of your page, select it with the mouse to copy it in its entirety (in short, it is nothing more than a text file).

The copied content should be pasted to a new page created in WordPress. In effect, going back to your Dashboard in WordPress, you will select Page > Add New as we show you in the screenshot below:

Recall: the new WordPress Gutenberg editor allows us to create a block of HTML, and that's exactly what we're needing:

Once the block has been created, we will paste the HTML content taken from our Blogger, and that's it!

Grades: remember to give the page created in WordPress the same name it had in Blogger.

You will have to repeat the operation for each page you have created in Blogger.

Fifth step: retrieve the correct structure of URLs

As in this guide we also intend to cover the SEO aspect of the move, from that desire we suggest keeping the same urls of each section of the content.

If we enter any post on our Blogger, we will notice something similar to this in the browser's address bar:

miblogenblogger.com/2020/05/my-post

This string of elements is easy to interpret: domino, year, month, entry title.

With this in mind, we can now replicate the structure in our WordPress installation. Luckily, WordPress allows us to set the composition of each URL or path through its configuration settings. Permanent Links. Let's see the screenshot below:

As seen in the screenshot above, WordPress makes it possible to customize the URLs of our posts to our preference: from the first 'Simple' option (which has nothing to do with SEO since it only places the entry number and that's it) to the 'Custom structure' field, where, thanks to the labels that we see under the highlighted orange box, it is possible build a route to our measure.

In general, our Blogger entries will respond to the third option, 'Month and name', and it will be enough to check it for the magic to happen.

If this is not the case, we will appeal to the 'Custom Structure' field. Suppose our Blogger Posts route is of the type year/category/my-post.HTML… How can we replicate this in WordPress? Easy. Pay attention to the labels to understand how you should fill in the 'Custom Structure' field.

Each piece of the path is enclosed in '%' (without the tildes) and is separated just as different subsections of a URL do, that is with /. So, when we intend to create a structure of the type myblog.com/year/category/my-post.html, we need to write the following inside 'Custom Structure':

/%year%/tegory%/%postname%.html

Note: we have used this example to include the cases where our blogger entries have the HTML extension

if not the case, then your custom field should look like this:

After completing this step, we can almost finish the migration.

Note: The post structure in WordPress is something you can change at any time, and it is instantly reflected in the browser. So do not be afraid to make mistakes, since they can be corrected from one second to another.

Step Six: Redirecting Your Traffic

As you can imagine, your audience will continue to enter your Blogger to read your content, and until Google/Bing do not 'understand' that your blog has been moved, the search results will continue to lead to the old Blog. But that's about to change.

The advantage of the "redirection" is that any user who enters mysiteonblogger.com/my-entry, you will automatically be redirected to mysiteatwordpress.com/my-post (and this happens in an inapparent way, so much so that most people probably don't even notice it at first).

To achieve this, we first need to install a plugin in our WordPress: with you, BloggerToWordPress.

To install it (and as we always do), we go to Plugins > Add new as shown in the screenshot below.

Installed and activated the plugin, we will look for its configuration panel here:

The configuration panel that we will see has two important aspects: the quote that warns us that we must leave the plugin running so that the redirection continues to be fulfilled, and the 'Start configuration' button, that is, start the configuration. There we will click to see the following screen.

Since we have already imported our Posts into WordPress in step 3, the Blogger to WordPress plugin will be able to find the import after we hit the start button. What we need now is to get a modified code of our theme in Blogger so that we can establish a bridge between it and WordPress. For this, we will click on the 'Get Code' button as shown in the screenshot above.

We must copy the code that has just been generated (Ctrl + C) to be able to enter it in Blogger.

Go to your blog on Blogger and go to the 'Topics' section. On your blog preview image itself, select 'Edit HTML'.

Edit HTML allows you to open a window for editing the complete code of our template in typical HTML language. Something like that:

In this step, we need to delete, or rather replace all of our original HTML code with the one we just copied from plugin Blogger to WordPress in our WordPress.

Replaced the code, we will click on 'save'.

Note: keep in mind that, after this step, your Blogger blog will only function as a bridge to your WordPress site. It will not have content per se, nor custom settings. From now on, every time a user enters any section in Blogger, either from a shortcut, because he manually types the address, or because he has been sent by a search engine like Google or Bing, Blogger will redirect traffic to that section of your new blog (which is what we need).

Eventually, search engines will understand that the content has been migrated, and therefore the search results in Google and Bing will change to the new URLs in your WordPress.

Note: The time this happens depends exclusively on the search engines and not on the work we have done so far or the plugin we have used. In Google's words, “There is no fixed crawl frequency (for URL changes); it all depends on the size of your site, and the crawl speed that is possible. The change is made URL by URL individually».

Another thing: thanks to the fact that the redirections that we have practiced have a reference code number 301, the ranking strength of our URLs will remain intact.

Summary and Conclusion

Blogger is a reliable alternative for starting a blog, practicing uploading, or getting your foot in the water of building a community of loyal readers. It's easy to use, but as soon as your blog grows, or you want to monetize your content (for example, add a store), Blogger's limitations become tangible.

WordPress, for its part, will allow you to turn your blog into the 'aminal' you want. If you previously had a canary on Blogger, with WordPress your blog is capable of transforming into a dragon.

Things to do

• Look for a web hosting that, as far as possible, provides WordPress support (a guide to discerning a good hosting from a so-so one is here).
• Migrate your Tickets manually in the way we teach you, exporting an XML file and importing it with the native Blogger import tool provided by WordPress.
• If you have also created pages in your Blogger, you need to copy the HTML code (using the HTML edit view) of each of the pages, then create their peers in WordPress, and paste the HTML code in the HTML view or using the Gutenberg HTML block.
• Download and activate the “Blogger to WordPress” plugin in your WordPress to generate a modified code of the HTML of the theme of your Blogger site. Replace the original code with this one.

Do you still have doubts, or a particular question? Write it in the comments and we will answer you as soon as possible. If you are ready to take the step and want advice, or hire this service, along with your new WordPress site, write to us at [email protected]

We are here to help you.

We wish you success in the migration, and thank you for reading.