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Migrating Your Blog from Blogger to WordPress  

A while back, freelancer Kristen King asked whether she should move her blog from Blogger to WordPress. From the comments she received, the answer was a resounding “Yes”. And that (along with my own experiences) was the catalyst for this blog entry.

I’m not surprised that more and more people are considering a move to WordPress. It’s a powerful, flexible, and easy to use platform for blogging and Web publishing. If you currently use Blogger and are considering a move to WordPress, you can migrate your blog fairly quickly and easily. There are a few things that you’ll have to keep in mind when doing the migration, though.

Getting Going

Obviously, the first step in the migration process is to install and configure WordPress. There are three ways to get a WordPress blog. The first is to download the WordPress software from WordPress.org. Or, you can sign up for an account that’s hosted at WordPress.com. If your Web hosting company supports it, the other way is to automatically install WordPress using your Web account’s control panel and a Web application called Fantastico.

Once you have WordPress up and running, you can begin the migration. The steps involved in the migration differ depending on how you are hosting and publishing your blog. There are two options hosting/publishing options available: migrate from Blogger’s servers or from your own Web site.

Migrating from Blogger’s Servers

Many Blogger users host their weblogs on Blogger’s servers. You can tell which ones do that because the URL of the blog contains blogspot.com — for example, myblog.blogspot.com. If this is you, then the migration is straightforward.

First, log into your WordPress administration panel. Then, click Manage > Import. From there, click the Blogger link.

A page will appear, asking you whether or not you want to give WordPress access to your Blogger account. Click OK. If all goes well, a list of blogs appears, long with the number of entries for those blogs.

Next, click Import. The entire process takes less than a minute, even with a large blog. Once it’s finished, you can apply templates and modify your new WordPress blog to your heart’s content.

But what happens if you host your blog on your own Web server? Well, the process gets a little more involved. The extra work involved is worthwhile, though.

Migrating from your own Web Server to WordPress

Blogger enables you to post your blog to your own Web server. When you create a blog entry, Blogger uploads your blog and its archives, via FTP or SFTP, using the log in information that you provided when you set up the blog. Even though your blog’s data is mirrored on Blogger’s servers, the published files (which WordPress is interested in) aren’t. And that could cause a few problems.

Recently, I tried to migrate a couple of blogs from my old Web host to the WordPress blogs that I’d set up on my new host. I followed the instructions that are detailed earlier, and the blogs appeared in the list. However, when I clicked Import nothing happened. This was frustrating because although I knew the process wasn’t working, I couldn’t figure out why.

Eventually, I came up with a simple solution: publish the blog to Blogger’s servers and then try the import again. Publishing your blog to Blogger’s servers is easy, and won’t affect the blog on your web server in any way. To change your Blogger publishing settings, click Settings > Publishing. Then, click Switch to: Blogspot.com, and enter a Blogger address. This doesn’t have to be a serious address — I entered http://jugglingpanda.blogspot.com for one of my blogs. After that, click Save Settings.

From here, follow the instructions for migrating a blog from Blogger’s server that are detailed earlier.

If you’re moving from one Web host to another, try to make sure that the folder containing your WordPress blog on your new server has the same name as the one housing your Blogger weblog on your old server — for example, weblog/. If that’s not possible, you’ll have to redirect visitors to the new location of your blog.

Next Steps

While the migration process is safe, you might find that you’ve lost some or all of the images and comments that were associated with your Blogger weblog. If you used Blogger’s comments feature then any comments will migrate properly. But Blogger didn’t always have a comments feature, especially for blogs that were published to a separate Web server. So, if you outsourced your comments to a service like Haloscan those comments will be lost.

You’ll also lose your links to other blogs and Web sites (also called a blogroll). If you want to include them in your WordPress blog, you’ll have to add them by hand. Permalinks– permanent links to old posts — don’t always carry over properly, either. The instructions here explain how to preserve permalinks.

You should, at the very least, keep the front page of your Blogger weblog with a note that your blog has moved, along with a pointer to the new location.

On the other hand, there are a few things that you will need to do if you hosted your Blogger weblog on your own Web server. The first is point visitors to your new blog. Chances are, the main page of your Blogger weblog was named blogger.html or index.html. A WordPress blog, on the other hand, uses index.php as the name of its front page.

If you want the people who visited your old blog to be automatically redirected to your new one, just create an empty file with the same name as your Blogger front page, and then add the following to the header of that file:

META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”1; URL=index.php”

This will cause a visitor’s browser to jump to the new main page. The redirection will only take about a second, and shouldn’t be noticeable. If you’ve installed WordPress in another folder on your Web site, or on site with a different domain name, include the name of the folder or location of your WordPress blog before index.php in the redirect statement above.

A little paranoia is always good. In this case, that means backing up your blog. Doing this with a Blogger weblog is a bit involved. The full instructions for backing up your blog are here.

You might find, as I did, that having your old blog on Blogger really serves no purpose — especially after you’ve backed it up. So, why not delete it? To do that, log into Blogger and click Settings > Basic. Then, click Delete This Blog. Click OK on the confirmation message and, presto, your Blogger weblog is no more.

Conclusion

Migrating your blog from Blogger to WordPress can be quite easy. That doesn’t mean you won’t run into any bumps along the way. But once you know where those bumps are, you can easily get around them and start enjoying the power and flexibility of publishing your blog using WordPress.

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