Blogger and WordPress are the most widely used blogging platform out there, if you are looking for free solution then Blogger might be the best blogging solution but if you want to host blogs on your own platform then WordPress will wins the battle. Recently one of my friend who were using Blogger from quite a long time decided to go for self-hosted solution and as he had been writing blogs from a quite long time he wants to move his blog post as well as traffic which he is getting from search engine and also wants to keep rank.
WordPress allows you to import blogs from different blogging platform so its not a big deal, but keeping traffic and ranking could be a tough job. Here we will cover everything which helps you to move your blog completely from Blogger to WordPress.
Import Blogs :-
First we are going to import our all blog posts from Bloggers to our newly setup WordPress blog, import blogs in WordPress is very easy task, just login to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Tools->Import, now select Blogger, WordPress ask you to install a plugin, just install and run it, once you run that plugin it will ask you to authorize your Blogger account so that it can import blogs. Once you allow access to your Blogger blogs then you will be redirected to your WordPress blog.
You will now see your list of Blogger blogs, all you need to do is click on import button placed next of the list Bloggers Blogs.
Now WordPress will import blogs and once it finishes importing blogs you will be asked to assign a author to the blog post, you can either assign an exiting author or create a new one.
That’s it we had imported all blogs to our new WordPress blog from old Blogger.
Matching Permalink :-
We had imported blogs to WordPress, but WordPress and Blogger has different permalink structure, so we will try to make our WordPress permalink structure as close as of Blogger’s. If you had seen Blogger’s permalink then you will find that it has blog name followed by date which is followed by post name.
In WordPress navigate to Setting->Permalinks, and select Month and Name one, if you want then you can skip year from URL.
Setup redirection :-
Most important part is here, we had imported blogs and setup URL but what if any of your exiting user lands on your old blog?? He will get same old blog post but what if we can redirect them to our new blog, If any of your user try to open your old blog or any of old post then he will be taken to your WordPress website and post will be served there, remember we had imported posts. This thing works with search engine too, if search engine visit your old Blogger blog then it will be redirected to new WordPress blog and it will start crawling it.
Redirection is done at two level, at first Blogger will redirect user and at second level when user is taken to WordPress blog he will be taken to the exact post which he is looking on Blogger. For this we are going to use Blogger To WordPress plugin by RtCamp, just install this plugin on your WordPress account and activate it, once its activated you will find a new option under Tools menu, Click on Start Configuration to start it.
On next screen, click on Get Code button to get code which we need to paste on Blogger.
Once you copy code, open your Blogger account and navigate to Setting-Template, once you are at Template page scroll down to the last of the page and click on Revert To Classic Template.
Once you had reverted you will see an edit template option, click on it as we are going to replace exiting code with the copied one. That’s it, redirection is done, second level redirection is done by plugin itself so you need not to do anything.
Redirect Feeds :-
Last thing, now users are being redirected to new blog but what about your feed subscribers, they wont notice that you had shifted, for this just redirect your feeds to WordPress blog feeds, for this navigate to your blogger Setting->Others, here under Site feed add your new feed in Post Feed Redirect URL.
That’s it, now you had completely moved blog from Blogger to WordPress by maintaining your traffic and search engine ranking. Your images are still hosted on Blogger but its not a problem as Blogger imported tool will import blog post and comments only and your images URL will point to blogger where they are being hosted and its totally fine.
