As you’ll have noted from previous posts, I recently moved to this WordPress site from a Blogger blog. There are various reasons for this but mainly because the search functionality for Blogger content was useless. The added benefit for moving to WordPress is the additional level of control I now have over everything.
WordPress also makes it easy to move your content from Blogger via its import tool within the WordPress admin interface. Go to Tools > Import, select Blogger and let WordPress have permission to access your blog. Note that the transfer wizard only picks up posted articles, not anything in draft.
That’s the easy bit and you may have to manually review some of your posts to make sure the content was correctly moved (e.g. I used SyntaxHighlighter in Blogger and I wanted to make sure the relevant posts still appear okay in WordPress).
As well as your content you’ll want to perform a few other actions to make the move seamless…
1. Backup your Blogger blog. Use the Blogger backup tool to make a backup copy of your blog for future reference. You’ll hopefully not need it again.
2. We want to set up a redirect page from Blogger to your new site. Go to Blogger and on the Template Page click on Revert to Classic Template link. Now click on Edit and replace EVERYTHING in the text box with this code which will redirect any traffic which visits your Blogger site to your WordPress site so your Blogger site will no longer be accessible (the Blogger admin pages can still be accessed). Obviously take my details out and put yours in.
<!DOCTYPE HTML> <html lang="en-US"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=https://www.mc-guinness.co.uk/blog"> <script type="text/javascript"> window.location.href = "https://www.mc-guinness.co.uk/blog" </script> <title><$BlogPageTitle$></title> </head> <body> This site has been re-located. If you are not redirected automatically, click here: <a href='https://www.mc-guinness.co.uk/blog'>https://www.mc-guinness.co.uk/blog</a> </body> </html>
Note that my Blogger site was very new and only had a couple of hundred page views when I moved it. It was not high in any search rankings either so I didn’t have to worry about that. However if you are high in ranking or if you have specific posts in Blogger which gather a LOT of views then you will want to maintain these rankings and force a redirect from each individual Blogger post to the corresponding WordPress post. You can do this using the guide here:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/switch-from-blogger-to-wordpress/9707/
Once you have moved to WordPress, you should now let Google know by setting up or updating your Google Webmaster profile (https://www.google.com/webmasters/), also submit an XML sitemap to Google to allow better search results. You can generate an XML my using the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin.