Moving Blogger Blog to WordPress

As you can see, I took the leap and moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress two days ago. I’ve been using WordPress more and more – both for my own new niche sites and for work I do for clients… and I have fallen in love with WordPress.

I was scared to make the move from Blogger to WordPress… What if I lost everything? All in all, it turned out to be a very painless experience and is quite simple to do.

For anyone thinking of making the move from Blogger, let me tell you how I did it.

First, let me just clarify that I had my own domain name (www.PotPieGirl.com) that was being hosted by Blogger. I wanted to move PotPieGirl.com AND all it’s content (posts and comments) over to my own hosting where I would be using the WordPress blog platform.

Moving a Blogger Blog to WordPress

1 – I went and changed my DNS to point to my hosting account

2 – While waiting for the DNS to ‘take’, I went into my cpanel and added PotPieGirl.com. I then installed WordPress with Fantastico.

3- Next, I uploaded the theme I wanted and any plug-ins into their respective folder in wp-content.

4- I then went into the wp-admin side of my new WordPress blog and activated the theme and the plug ins. I made some more personal preference adjustments and I was ready.

5 – Time to move the blog over to it’s new WordPress home on my own hosting. This part is simple – really! Go into wp-admin. Click ‘manage’ and then click ‘import’. You will then see a list of options – one of which is “Blogger”. Click that and follow the rest of the directions. It is fast… and painless.

I got all my instructions and info from here.

Painless… simple… fast.

What to Do with Old Blogger Blog

However, I now realized that I had a Blogspot blog and my new WordPress blog out there on the www … and they both had the exact same content. Now what?

I thought about deleting my old Blogger blog, but there are a ton of images that Blogger has hosted for me. It will take a while to move them over, but if I deleted the Blogger blog, they would all be gone ::poof!:::: I knew a 301 redirect was not possible being that we don’t have .htaccess ability on Blogger hosted blogs… so, what to do?

I ended up finding good solutions here and here. I did it.. it works fine (or at least appears to do the trick). I know I will lose some ‘link juice’ since the urls of my posts didn’t transfer exactly (Blogger urls end in .html).

I did use Googles WebMaster Tools to help me tho. I got my url in there and submitted a new site map. Just 2 days later, it seems Google has already gotten the majority of my the new urls indexed.

Thats all there was to it!  Moving from Blogger to WordPress was much easier than I thought it would be.