Blogger and WordPress are famous blogging platforms on the web. Choosing between Blogger and WordPress is a tricky part. Both has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. WordPress is a robust blogging platform with it’s awesome Themes, Plugins and Widgets. On a Blogger blog we need to implement SEO manually. But using simple plugins we can easily implement SEO on a WordPress blog. If you decide to migrate from Blogger to WordPress follow the below procedure.
Switch from Blogger to WordPress – The Beginning
The Objective: Your blog xyz.blogspot.com is currently hosted on Blogger but now you want to move your blog from Blogger to WordPress (Self-hosted) with a personal domain name say xyz.com
The Difficulties in Moving from Blogger to WordPress
WordPress has import tool using which we can easily import Blogger blog posts, comments and categories to WordPress blog but still there are bigger issues to deal.
1. When you migrate from Blogger to WordPress all your old posts urls will be changed. Blogger has no 301 redirect option to inform search engines that your blog has moved to a new web address thus you loose search engine traffic.
2. Some of your old posts on blogspot.com could be ranked high for certain keywords. When you migrate to WordPress with new web address you might loose all that organic search traffic.
3. People who liked your posts might bookmarked your article. Some bloggers might have given link to your post in their post. Since you migrated to new web address you loose all that traffic and Backlinks.
4. When you switch from Blogger to WordPress there are chances of loosing your feed Subscribers unless they manually update their feed url. Thus your page rank and visitors count will go down.
Now we know all the issues that we have to deal when migrating from Blogger to WordPress. We will overcome all the issues step by step by following below procedure.
Migrate from Blogger to WordPress.
Before doing this Goto Blogger-->Template-->BackUp/Restore-->Download full template. this will download your template and by doing so you have backed up your template.
#1 If you don’t have a custom domain and hosting then buy a new domain and hosting from a web hosting company which offers PHP and MySQL databases and install WordPress in your new hosting account.
#2 Login to your WordPress account. On your WordPress dashboard under Tools click on Import and Select Blogger. Grant access to your Google account then all your Blogger blog posts, comments and categories will be imported to WordPress.
#3 Copy the below code to a empty notepad file and save it as blogger.php and upload the file to WordPress Theme Directory. To upload the file login to cPanel of your hosting account and use any FTP client or some hosting companies are providing direct upload option.
Note: You have to upload this blogger.php file in your theme directory i.e. wp-content/themes/my-theme, where my-theme is the folder name for the theme that you’re using on your WordPress site.
#4 From your WodrPress Dashboard Click on Pages and Add New Page. Keep the page Title and url as blogger. Under Page Attribute select Template blogger from the drop down menu. No need to add any content just Save the page.
#5 Open your Blogger Dashboard -> Layout -> Edit HTML and choose “Revert to default template”. Empty the Template and Copy-paste the below code in the “Edit Template” area and click “Save Template Changes”.
Note: In the above code replace naijaclub10.com with your WordPress site url.
From now your Blogger posts should redirect to corresponding WordPress post. Thus you won’t loose organic search traffic.
RSS Feed Update
We have done everything expect RSS feed update. Once you switch from Blogger to WordPress your RSS feed url will also change. Login to FeedBurner and update your feed url. Default WordPress feed url will be website.com/feed.
Note: Still the Blogger to WordPress Migration is not 100% done. All your image urls will point to your old Blogger blog posts only. So it is recommended not to delete your old Blogger blog. If you delete it all your images in WordPress posts will be broken.
Switch from Blogger to WordPress – The Beginning
The Objective: Your blog xyz.blogspot.com is currently hosted on Blogger but now you want to move your blog from Blogger to WordPress (Self-hosted) with a personal domain name say xyz.com
The Difficulties in Moving from Blogger to WordPress
WordPress has import tool using which we can easily import Blogger blog posts, comments and categories to WordPress blog but still there are bigger issues to deal.
1. When you migrate from Blogger to WordPress all your old posts urls will be changed. Blogger has no 301 redirect option to inform search engines that your blog has moved to a new web address thus you loose search engine traffic.
2. Some of your old posts on blogspot.com could be ranked high for certain keywords. When you migrate to WordPress with new web address you might loose all that organic search traffic.
3. People who liked your posts might bookmarked your article. Some bloggers might have given link to your post in their post. Since you migrated to new web address you loose all that traffic and Backlinks.
4. When you switch from Blogger to WordPress there are chances of loosing your feed Subscribers unless they manually update their feed url. Thus your page rank and visitors count will go down.
Now we know all the issues that we have to deal when migrating from Blogger to WordPress. We will overcome all the issues step by step by following below procedure.
Migrate from Blogger to WordPress.
Before doing this Goto Blogger-->Template-->BackUp/Restore-->Download full template. this will download your template and by doing so you have backed up your template.
#1 If you don’t have a custom domain and hosting then buy a new domain and hosting from a web hosting company which offers PHP and MySQL databases and install WordPress in your new hosting account.
#2 Login to your WordPress account. On your WordPress dashboard under Tools click on Import and Select Blogger. Grant access to your Google account then all your Blogger blog posts, comments and categories will be imported to WordPress.
#3 Copy the below code to a empty notepad file and save it as blogger.php and upload the file to WordPress Theme Directory. To upload the file login to cPanel of your hosting account and use any FTP client or some hosting companies are providing direct upload option.
Note: You have to upload this blogger.php file in your theme directory i.e. wp-content/themes/my-theme, where my-theme is the folder name for the theme that you’re using on your WordPress site.
<?php /* Template Name: blogger */ global $wpdb; $old_url = $_GET['q']; if ($old_url != “”) { $permalink = explode(“blogspot.com”, $old_url); $q = “SELECT guid FROM $wpdb->posts LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta “. “ON ($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id) WHERE “. “$wpdb->postmeta.meta_key=’blogger_permalink’ AND “. “$wpdb->postmeta.meta_value=’$permalink[1]‘”; $new_url = $wpdb->get_var($q)? $wpdb->get_var($q) : “/”; header (“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”); header(“Location: $new_url”); } ?>
#4 From your WodrPress Dashboard Click on Pages and Add New Page. Keep the page Title and url as blogger. Under Page Attribute select Template blogger from the drop down menu. No need to add any content just Save the page.
#5 Open your Blogger Dashboard -> Layout -> Edit HTML and choose “Revert to default template”. Empty the Template and Copy-paste the below code in the “Edit Template” area and click “Save Template Changes”.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”><html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”dir=”<$BlogLanguageDirection$>”><head><title><$BlogPageTitle$></title><script type=”text/javascript”>
<MainOrArchivePage>window.location.href=’http://naijaclub10.com/’</MainOrArchivePage>
<Blogger><ItemPage>
window.location.href=’http://naijaclub10.com/blogger/?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>’
</ItemPage></Blogger>
</script><MainPage><link rel=”canonical” href=”http://naijaclub10.com/” /></MainPage>
<Blogger><ItemPage>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://naijaclub10.com/blogger/?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>” />
</ItemPage></Blogger>
</head><body><div style=”border:#ccc 1px solid; background:#eee; padding:20px; margin:80px;”>
<p>This page has moved to a new address.</p><h1>
<MainOrArchivePage>
<a href=”http://naijaclub10.com“><$BlogTitle$></a>
</MainOrArchivePage>
<Blogger>
<ItemPage>
<a href=”http://naijaclub10.com/blogger/?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>”><$BlogItemTitle$></a>
</ItemPage>
</Blogger>
</h1></div>
</body>
</html>
Note: In the above code replace naijaclub10.com with your WordPress site url.
From now your Blogger posts should redirect to corresponding WordPress post. Thus you won’t loose organic search traffic.
RSS Feed Update
We have done everything expect RSS feed update. Once you switch from Blogger to WordPress your RSS feed url will also change. Login to FeedBurner and update your feed url. Default WordPress feed url will be website.com/feed.
Note: Still the Blogger to WordPress Migration is not 100% done. All your image urls will point to your old Blogger blog posts only. So it is recommended not to delete your old Blogger blog. If you delete it all your images in WordPress posts will be broken.
Thank's, this article has really help, gonna migrate from blogger soon. than's.
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