How To Move Your Blog From Blogger To WordPress (Step By Step Guide 2020)

What is a Blogger account?

Blogger is a well-known free blogging platform and a google content management system. When a person wants to start a blog as a beginner on a low budget, there is a chance that blogger would be among the first choice to go to among other free blogging platforms.

When I had the thoughts of starting a blog for my poems, blogger was my first go to because I had friends that have already started using blogging for different reasons like fashion, beauty and lifestyle, entertainment and so on.

But over time, with the simplicity and advent of scaling a blog for making money, a free platform is not good enough. From customization options to finding out that it’s hard to make money by running a blog on blogger. Whatever reason you have, blogger is a cute platform that’s perfect for complete beginners.

Why should you consider switching to WordPress?

There is also a free WordPress platform, but a self-hosted WordPress is completely customizable with access to the backend customization knowledge.

Having a self-hosted website puts you in charge where you own the site (brand), domain, and entire contents. There are no limitations to get what you want from your website.

Best known for its clean designs, WordPress is home to tens of thousands of free & premium themes, plugins you can use.

When you self-host with a renowned hosting company, you will have unlimited storage, bandwidth, and support.

So, have you made your final decision to move the blog?

If your answer is Yes, then I think you have made the right decision – starting with a self-hosted website is a good choice and there must be some perks with which I am ready to guide you through.

I understand that you must have invested a lot in your blogger website; it will be a shame to forget all about it.

Don’t worry about transferring your posts, images, and contents; if you stick to me, I will show how to transfer your blog from blogger to WordPress in no time.

Unfortunately, it is not possible for you to transfer the entire site as it appears on Blogger. The style of your blog (theme, extensions, fonts, colors, widgets, etc.) will have to be added separately. You can only transfer these data:

Posts & Pages

Comments

Categories

Media

Permalinks

Feed

Authors

Traffic

If you are ready, let’s get started with the transfer.

Do not rush the steps, it’s going to take some time but with this easy step by step guide you can do it!

Determine your preferred WordPress hosting

Moving from blogger to your self-hosted WordPress platform would require finding a WordPress hosting company that will take all your files. You will have to install WordPress on that host, and you have to trust the company because you are starting to get serious with blogging and this should not be taken for granted.

There are lots of hosting companies on the web that provide WordPress hosting services. I have tried a couple of these services and that was because I had no idea of the best to use at a time.

When you search on Google, you would find a hosting review website that compares and rate websites which most of them are paid for to get people to buy their hosting plans that never meet the best of needs.

To help with you that I recommend one of the best hosting companies, host your website or blog with Bluehost. Bluehost is a company that helps over 2 million bloggers get their files hosted online. You will get a free domain name when you sign up with them and if you don’t like their services, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

START A BLOG

Transfer from Blogger to WordPress; Now!

At this point, your mind is made up and it’s time to transfer your data from your old blog.

Open your newly installed WordPress site

Go to Plugins -> Add New and search for “Blogger Importer Extended”

Install and activate the plugin

Go to Tools -> Import and find “pipdig WordPress Migrator”

Click “Run Importer” blue link below the title

The blogger Importer Extended works automatically, instead of manually importing and exporting files

While the automation is about to get into progress, you will need to connect the plugin to your Blogger account. So, click on the “Connect to Blogger” button, log in to your Blogger account. After this, you will be able to select your blog.

The blogger importer extended will start working on its own and you will be able to see a few progress bars.

This will let you know how many posts, pages, comments, and images you have to import. If you have a lot of posts and images, be prepared to wait for a few hours until everything gets done.

Also, something I found out recently while doing a transfer with this plugin, it can’t always tell you the correct number of pictures you have. So be prepared to wait much longer because there may be hundreds and hundreds of images more than reported

After this, you can continue working your way through the migration process with the next step.

Assign a site administrator

When you have lots of posts on your blogger blog it gets difficult to recognize, so having an admin will solve the importing of your blog to a WordPress site.

But if you would like to separate the content from the new one that you are going to add, later on, you can also create a new user directly from this page. In that case, you can write the name of a new user. Its user role will be set to subscriber and the password will be randomly generated. You can change the user details later on.

After deciding whom to assign the content to, click the “Submit” button and you are all done.

Now, your blogger blog has been successfully transferred to your new website. Permalinks are URLs that WordPress uses when organizing posts & pages.

Each post, page, media file, etc. has to have a unique permalink (the address) to work properly. Permalinks do have a huge impact on your site and SEO. And while you can set them up as you wish when starting a new website, I would like to suggest a different approach when importing a site from Blogger.

Blogger uses month & name to tell apart it’s permalinks. So, if you go to any of your Blogger posts, you will see that it looks something like this: https://yourblogname.blogspot.com/2019/05/this-is-post-title.html

In order to keep things in order, I suggest changing the permalink structure in WordPress to resemble that one in Blogger as much as possible:

Setting up permalinks

Go to Settings -> Permalinks

Choose “Month and Name” option

Scroll down and click “Save changes” button

Doing Redirection from old content to new content

This part is very important. Using blogger for a while now you must have been had some google search impact and I also believe that you must have been sharing your post via social and have regular visits. The best you should do is moving your blog users from the old address to the new one.

Instead of losing all those visitors that decide to stop by the old blog, you should redirect them to the new self-hosted WordPress site you have just set up.

In order to make this work, you will need to set up the redirections both on your Blogger and WordPress site.

If you haven’t already installed the blogger to WordPress plugin, then you have to do that now. This is to help you with redirection; this plugin will help out with automatic redirection.

Install and activate the plugin

Go to Tools -> Blogger to WordPress Redirection

Click on Start Configuration button to generate code for your Blogger blog

You should see the name of your Blogger blog if you have imported it correctly

Click on “Get Code” button

Log in to your Blogger account

Navigate to Themes

Scroll all the way down and click on “Revert to classic themes”

Select the entire code in the Edit Theme HTML and delete it

Paste the code you have copied from the plugin

Paste the code you have copied from the plugin

Log in to your WordPress site

Navigate to Appearance -> Editor which will open the theme editor

On the right side menu, find “Theme Function” (functions.php file) which is usually on top of the list

Click on the file to start editing it. The code will load into the main window

Copy and paste the following code on the bottom of the file:

function blogger_query_vars_filter($vars) { $vars[] = “blogger”; return $vars; } add_filter(‘query_vars’, ‘blogger_query_vars_filter’); function blogger_template_redirect() { global $wp_query; $blogger = $wp_query – > query_vars[‘blogger’]; if (isset($blogger)) { wp_redirect(get_wordpress_url($blogger), 301); exit; } } add_action(‘template_redirect’, ‘blogger_template_redirect’); function get_wordpress_url($blogger) { if (preg_match(‘@^(?:https?://)?([^/]+)(.*)@i’, $blogger, $url_parts)) { $query = new WP_Query( array(“meta_key” = > “blogger_permalink”, “meta_value” = > $url_parts[2] ) ) ; if ($query – > have_posts()) { $query – > the_post(); $url = get_permalink(); } wp_reset_postdata(); } return $url ? $url : home_url(); } Click “Update file” button on the bottom of the page

You do not need to change anything in this code. As soon as you click the “Update file” button, your current theme will get instructed to redirect users from Blogger to the exact post you previously imported into your new WordPress site.

Important note: If you decide to change the WordPress theme, you will have to repeat this step and copy the code to a Theme Functions file of the new theme.

Now it’s time to Redirect Feeds

Before you think it’s all over we have one last step, just chill while going through this together!

We are still not done with the redirection part. We understand your pain; there are not many people in this world who love to go through time-consuming setups, but you will have to find that inner peace and focus for a few more minutes. Don’t forget that you are doing this to improve your blog.

If you have had RSS subscribers, they will not be able to tell that the migration happened. So, in order not to lose their trust, you will have to make another redirection and tell your Blogger blog that you have a new RSS feed.

Luckily, there’s no coding involved:

Go to your Blogger blog

Navigate to Settings -> Other

Find the “Site Feed” section

Next to the “Post Feed Redirect URL”, click the “Add” link

Type in https://yoursite.com/feed/ and don’t forget to change the name of your site

Do not forget to save settings by clicking the button on the top-right corner of the page

This is it! The redirections are finally over and both the posts and RSS feed are linking back to your self-hosted WordPress site.

It’s time for testing. But feel to contact me if you still can’t get this right. I would be more than happy to help out.

If you have followed the steps, you have also successfully migrated your blog from Blogger to WordPress. Congratulations!

Just to make sure that everything went smoothly, we suggest that you do some tests.

Go to any of your old Blogger posts and try to reload them. If everything was ok, you should now be redirected to the corresponding WordPress post!

You can repeat the test and try opening a few more posts to make sure there are no problems. If you are not being redirected automatically, go back to the Redirect section and make sure you did everything correctly:

Check if you have copied the entire code

Check if you replaced the URL of your site in all the places and if you have you edited the right functions.php file.

If you are using an RSS reader, you can also test the RSS feed for redirections by clicking on the link to one of your posts. It should now lead to the WordPress site.

What about my images?

Usually, WordPress will automatically import the images to the WordPress Media Library. If you had images in a post, it will automatically appear in the same post on your new WordPress site. But don’t take it for granted. Sometimes, the Importer might miss importing some of your images, or the imported images might not be linked correctly.

If that is the case with your new blog, you can still resolve the issue quite quickly.

Before you start to panic, check your Media Library:

Go to Media -> Library

Check if your old images are visible here

If the images are there, check if their link to the host instead of blogger.com. Click on the image and check the URL field to see if it’s pointing back to Blogger or your new domain

Moving Missing images

If the Importer missed uploading images, you can still quickly get them on your new WordPress blog. You will have to install a plugin that will take care of that.

I don’t usually recommend outdated plugins, but this one is still great for the job.

Go to Plugins -> Add New

Search for “Import external attachments”

Install and activate the plugin

Go to Media -> Import attachments

If there are any images that the Importer hasn’t imported yet, the plugin will link them on the page. All you have to do here is to click the “Import attachments now” button. The plugin can import 50 images at the time, so allow some time until all the images get added to the library.

When You Have Wrong image URLs

Sometimes, users might have their images imported to the Media Library without problems. But, in order for the images to show correctly, they have to point to the right address. In some cases, although the images are on your new host, your post and pages might still try to load the old ones (that are found on your old Blogger blog).

Go to Plugins -> Add New

Search for “Velvet Blues Update URLs“

Install and activate the plugin

Go to Tools-> Update URLs to configure plugin’s settings

On the settings page, you should enter your old URL (for example https://yourblog.blogspot.com/) and the new URL (for example https://yournewsite.com/).

You can leave the rest of the settings checked by default. Double-check the URLs and other settings, and click “Update URLs Now” button.

The plugin will then search for all instances of your old URL and switch them to the new one. You will be done in a minute, and all the URLs will be updated to the right one.

What to do next?

Your blog has finally been completely moved from Blogger to WordPress. Hopefully, you have checked it and everything works fine from the first take. If not, I suggest going through the steps one more time to see if you missed something. The whole migration process is not very demanding, but it definitely takes time and patience to complete.

If everything went smoothly for you, here’s what you could do next:

Keep your old blog on Blogger live. Don’t delete it as the redirection won’t work

Check the imported posts for errors. Sometimes, formatting of a post might get messed up so you will have to remove unnecessary spaces or broken links

Start exploring WordPress and learn more about it

Search for a WordPress theme that will represent your blog. Don’t forget to edit the Theme Functions file if you change the theme

Check some of the best plugins you can install.

Enjoy!