Blogspot is a great blogging platform, easy to use, and FREE. It does, however, have some limitations, and if you have reached one of these limits, this two part self help guide will help you migrate to a self-hosted WordPress site. I have written this guide while performing the migration referencing the work of several other bloggers – while taking into consideration the following:

• Import all post, comments and pages
• Maintain all permalinks, by mapping post structures between blogger and wordpress
• Redirecting permalinks for labels
• Transfer old page ranks and SEO to new wordpress site

To begin, you will need to setup your self-hosted WordPress blog. The following 3 guides below will get you to a point where you should have a WordPress blog site ready and waiting for the next stage.

 

 

 

 

 

Now that you have your WordPress blog already setup, here are the migration steps that I took to migrate a user.blogspot.com site

 

Step 1 – Back up the old user.blogspot.com site

 

There is a very easy (&fast) way to back up your entire blog site using the standard Blogger tool, called Export Blog (Settings->Basic->Export Blog). This creates an XML file of your entire site, but please note that this file is not compatible with WordPress.

 

I also (overdid) took a mirror snapshot of the entire blog using a tool called HTTrack – a website copier, and offline browser. Just as a comparison, the user.blogspot.com generated a 1.15MB XML file, whereas the mirror backup using HTTrack created a 7.8MB folder.

 

Step 2 – Placed a placeholder, countdown page

 

We elected to place a placeholder theme on our site to announce the pending arrival of the brand new site – gives us and the site owner time to perform the migration, and plan for new features.

 

Step 3 – Configuring WordPress Permalinks to adapt to Blogger’s post format

 

From your new WordPress dashboard, set up a custom permalink structure to accommodate post from your old blog (blogger). Dashboard->Settings->Permalinks then click the radio button next to ‘Custom Structure’ and enter the following:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

 where the post URL or Permalink will now read “domain.com/year/month/post-title.html”

 

You can change your Permalinks, after your complete your migration of old post.

 

Step 4 – The physical act of moving your blog post and comments into WordPress

 

For this part, head back to your WordPress dashboard->Tools-> and select from the choices presented. For this exercise, I choose Blogger. Remember, the list presented here are just plugins. If you don’t find your blog type listed here, search the plugin library to see if an importer is available.

Clicking on ‘Blogger’, you will then be asked to install the plugin, followed by an Authorization screen.

This is where the plugin will ask for your Blogspot access username and password, and to grant access permission. You will now be asked to HIT THE MAGIC button on the right !!

WordPress converted the 100 post in less than a minute. The Plugin now ask to set the authors for the newly migrated post, especially useful when you have contributing authors.

Congrats, you are done with the migration part of the exercise. There are still lots of stuff to do around maintaining and redirecting links, but for now, at least your old post has been transferred. If you come across any special HTML characters that are appearing on your post, then perhaps you might want to find and replace them using this plugin.

 

Part II will deal with all the redirection and permalink maintenance.