This is not a tutorial on moving your entire blogspot blog to wordpress, but a tutorial on how you can effectively make your wordpress blog work as a continuation of the blogger blog.
Also it is assumed that you already have a content rich blogger blog that is well ranked where ever it should be, else go for a complete migration. Google will help you!
This week I was in touch with 3 bloggers who had decided to move from Blogger to self hosted WordPress. As a WordPress Evangelist, it gives me immense pleasure when someone makes that decision.
Though there are ways to completely shift your blogger blog to wordpress and automatically redirect visitors to the new domain, I would say that you keep the old blogger blog intact and consider the new blog as a continuation of the old one. Why?
- Moving Content doesn’t move the page ranks and any other ranks you might have.
- A blog doesn’t mean just the contents; the endless hours you spent designing and perfecting things would mean nothing if you just delete the old one. (This might sound a bit too unprofessional, but blogging is a passion for many. You wouldn’t just delete something that you created out of passion, would you?)
- Instead of having to start over, it can act as a traffic source for you. A good share of the traffic that reaches your blogger blog via back-links would love to read your latest posts. (This part is discussed below)
- A secondary blog is always good as a status blog or an emergency blog. You can use it whenever the self hosted blog is down.
Moving the Furniture, Step by Step
Move your readers
Update the source of your RSS feed in Feedburner to the feed of your new WordPress blog. Login to your Feedburner account, Go to the analyze tab, Click “Edit Feed Details…” on top-left corner, Replace original Feed with the feed of your new blog. For WordPress blogs the default feed is http://yourblog.com/feed
Update the Source of RSS Feed in Feedburner as shown above
Install a Google Custom Search Box
Create a Google CSE and configure it to search both your old site and your new one. This can be easily done from within AdSense, see screenshot below. So users who hunt down for specific posts will always find what they need, no matter it’s a new post or one hosted on the blogspot blog. Install this Search Engine on both blogs.
Configure the Google CSE to Search both Blogger and WordPress Blogs
Add a note and a Site wide link
Add a small note mentioning that you have moved to the new location on your blogger blog with a direct link. People visiting your old blog via bookmarks will know its time to update their bookmarks.
Add a Latest Posts widget to your Blogger blog
Visitors who come to your blogger blog via backlinks would always like to read your latest posts. Thankfully, Blogger has a widget that can fetch the posts from any RSS. Use the RSS of your WordPress blog and add the widget to your blogger sidebar. Now the latest posts will be listed out on the blogger sidebar.
Use the RSS Feed Widget in Blogger to Fetch Latest Posts
Update Links
Update the Advertise, about-me, contact and even Home links on the blogger blog with the links on the wordpress blog. So you will never have to go back and edit the blogger pages when you change your advertising rates or your profile page. Also the home link pointing to the new blog will take the visitors to your brand new home instead of the blogger home. (Also, update the links of your Social Media profiles with your new blog.)
Twin Towers?
These days, blogger versions of popular WordPress themes are available. If you wish your blogs to look alike, change the blogger theme to match the wordpress blog.
That completes the integration. Now start blogging and your subscribed readers wouldn’t even notice the change until the next time they drop into to comment! Readers coming via bookmarks will update their bookmarks and those coming via backlinks will reach your blogger blog, read what they came in for and when they start looking for more, they will find your new blog!
Did I miss anything? Feel free to add your suggestion and thanks in advance 🙂
P.S: I wrote parts of this post in a Facebook conversation with The Daily Blonde who just shifted from Blogger to WordPress, heart-felt Congrats! Later on, Dee asked me the same, so I figured out there are many out there who might need this. If you are looking for a guide to completely move your blogger blog to WordPress, this guide should help.
I am a WordPress product developer and creator of Image Attributes Pro. I am passionate about solving problems and travelling the world.
For the first time Arun, without any questions, I completely agree to your views 😀
🙁 It was fun fighting over with you man. And you always had a different angle to everything, that was cool. Next time, let see 🙂
Starting with blogspot was one of the biggest mistakes I made, you are safe, congrats and kudos 🙂
Even I had a blogger blog before starting my current blog on wordpress. But it was all copy paste stuff that time when I didn’t know anything about blogging. It was all about cars and bikes. I eventually had to delete that blog completely afraid of Google finding any link between that blog and my current blog. That mighty Google na…. 😀
Yeps, the mighty Google. I am not sure if they are monitoring our Gtalk chats and Gmail emails, lol, just kidding. It’s good to delete those stuffs that can give you a black list entry. It’s easier to break than to make and its true when it comes to reputation!
A comprehensive guide by an emerging blogging hero.BTW I think Google is not serious about Blogger business as well.
I wonder what they are doing these days, They havent done anything big after acquiring Blogger and they are trying to acquire more and more start-ups. What for..? Thanks for the good words there, really appreciated 🙂
Cheers mate..
Arun, This is a another nice technical post on your blog. But i am confused about blog shifting. Why people shifting their blogs from blogger to self hosted wordpress platform? I know wordpress have more customization option than Blogger. But i actually want to know key benefits of self hosting. I know you have best answer.
Alok,
Just my two copper here, but there will always be debates around blogging engines and comparative advantages and disadvantages of each. WordPress and Blogger just constitutes two of the major ones (the list also includes BlogEngine, TypePad, etc).
WordPress is currently the industry standard in terms of professional blogging and many of the top blogs and magazine style websites out there employ WordPress as their framework. An immense user base results in significant support and there are even employment opportunities going out there for WordPress experts.
In addition to this, if you are a freelancer (for example), a lot of websites out there require you to be familiar with WordPress.
The reputation of Blogger has been tarnished with the sheer amount of “spam blogs” (splogs) and the fact that Google has acquired but not really improved Blogger in significant ways. The level of customisation you can do with Blogger is excellent, but a lot of hacks that are required to get equal functionality to WordPress. And ultimately, with the sheer amount of hacks, changing templates, look&feel or adding functionality will require to you step around a lot of code.
All in all, the choice of blogging engine is entirely up to you. There will be “fanbois” on both sides and many have made a living out of advising people on how to get the best out of whichever engine they choose.
There are many people who are comfortable using blogger, so generally the advice would be to use whichever one you are happy with… as long as you can bear with the reactions 🙂
Windows vs Linux? PC vs Mac? Blogger vs WordPress…. 😉
Dee
Alok, thanks for the question. Let me try with my version of the answer.
Sorry Dee, I don’t agree with you.
WordPress and Blogger is not like choosing Windows v/s Linux or Mac v/s PC. Because Windows and Linux are two equally good stuffs, you choose the one on which you are comfortable with.
But Blogger v/s WordPress is a whole different issue. It’s ok to choose the one on which you are comfortable on if you are blogging just for the fun of blogging. But if you are serious, choosing WordPress is a must. Why?
1.You don’t own your Blogger blogs, even though you say the content is copyrighted, it’s Blogger who actually owns the blog. They choose to stop Blogger one day, and then you are at point zero. With a self hosted WordPress, you own the blog. Even if WordPress closes down one day, you don’t loose anything!
2.Blogger is never equivalent to WordPress. Even with thousands of lines of codes, you can never get a WordPress like functionality on Blogger. (Try making a sitemap for a blogger blog, at wordpress it’s automatically handled by a plugin!) The main point is that, WordPress is open source, so you can recode it to meet all of your needs. Thinking in the longer perspective, say after 10 years it would be so painful to start over when you find that something that you need cannot be done on blogger. WordPress is so flexible that you can virtually do whatever you like, provided you know coding.
3.You have plugins for virtually all your needs on WordPress, so the WordPress bloggers on your niche are definitely ahead of you in competition. So if you ever have a competition (which you will probably have, cuz all the niches are packed) the WordPress blogs will simply win. Why take chances?
So Alok, with all respect to Dee, let me advice you to move to a WordPress blog at the earliest. It’s just amazing.
Dee, you should try wordpress too. I was a blogger fan for quite a long time, shifted to WordPress and got addicted. I am sure, when you know the power of WordPress, your opinions will change. Thanks for the input!
Arun, I don’t think we’re disagreeing at all. I too am looking at moving shortly (hence the lack of activity on my blog while I organize everything (including budget approval from the wife!)).
As someone who has used both blogging platforms, you would be a much better person to give an objective opinion on the advantages and disadvantages of each. I’m merely the “newbie” who has limited opinions based on what he/she reads. And as always, where there is competitive products, there will always be opinions for and against each one.
Blogger won’t go away anytime soon. As a free, monetize ready platform, it will always appeal to casuals. You are correct in saying that if the purpose of the blog is long term, then WordPress would be a better choice.
🙂
Dee
Thanks man..
Yes! Blogging at Blogger was defenitely a additional benefit, if I had never used blogger, I would never have realized the power of WordPress.
But I wouldnt agree with you here either 😛 Blogger and WordPress are not two competitive products, just kidding.. lol. The WordPress addiction has made me a extrimist it seems.. 🙂
Move to WordPress asap and life will definitely change 🙂
Hey, I just got one point to prove that Blogging in Blogger is not safe. See the case of Yahoo Geocities, it was the popular free publishing tool of choice, I had a site there long back. Its closing down. Yahoo was the king of the internet in those days, see its fate now.. One day, what if Blogger decides to close down..? No once can predict the future, so play it safe right from the start. 🙂
Hi Dee & Arun,
I am bit late for giving my comment.
I am agree with Arun’s thought about ownership of your blog, this is really a big issue.
Dee, i saw your blog it’s cool look.
Anyway nice discussion with both of you.
Cheers!
Alok,
Yeah, the ownership of the blog, that should be of prime importance. You dont want someone to delete your blog after 5 years of hard work. See the fate of Geocities 🙂
Yeah, the discussion was good. Thanks for triggering it off 🙂
Cheers…
Hi Arun,
Thanks for your guide mate. This plus the guide to wordpress hosting services seem like an excellent starting point for me to investigate what i need to do to move my blog across.
When I first started on blogger, I quite liked the engine, but I’ve found that while there are workarounds for pretty much everything, I’ve outgrown it quickly. I’d rather spend the time writing quality articles than finding new hacks for the engine. In saying that, my intentions were never to monetise the blog, but it was so easy to create one there, that once I did it, it was more of a case of working with what I had rather than do a full analysis of the choice of blogging engine.
I believe most bloggers starting off this way. They begin their blogs for the purpose recording their thoughts and rants, and then they suddenly discover that their posts start to have a similar theme, and the blog becomes specialised. The problem here is that we all start off on a simple engine without thinking about the future. That combined with the fact that blogger as a free engine allows monetisation, it becomes a natural choice.
Only a small minority actually treat their blogs as a business island (ie, plan everything before its even set up). The practice of setting something up immediately with a short term view (but long term aspirations) is a common mistake as by that time we’re trapped in our choices and moving becomes difficult. I too am guilty of this.
I would prefer to do a full move and I see you have a link for that too 🙂 Excellent stuff.
Ta,
Dee
You said it Dee. I started off to record my findings, but unlike you, I took me whole 2 years to figure out that Blogger was not the match for me. But I am not complaining, I could find my style staying there on blogger, so as of now, my archives are clean. If I had started here, I would have to go back and edit those archives.
You are starting off, so it would be best you make a full move. And I don’t think you have to do that import-export stuff. When you do that, as per the tutorial, the permalink structure has to be maintained for a full redirect, i.e. the Blogger styled permalinks have to be used in the WordPress version. I never prefer that, cuz it leaves a permanent time stamp on your posts. I would prefer to keep my posts evergreen.
So instead of a redirect, you can choose to post every other post manually (hope you don’t have over 50 posts now) and truncate the posts on blogger and leave a link there to the wordpress post. That would bring in all the blogger traffic, plus the freedom to choose the permalinks. Just my suggestion, use it if it sounds good.
Anyway, make the shift asap, that’s better!
Thanks for the advice Arun.. my migration to WordPress is almost over. Even got an extra domain name for it. The test site is at http://www.newbtech.net and once i’ve finalised everything, the .com domain name should be migrated over this weekend i hope 🙂
I must say, working with PHP is quite different and massaging the template has been a learning exercise heh.
Later!
Dee
Yeah, PHP is quite different and its easier than than the codes at Blogger, atleast for me.
So we have a fresh wordpress blogger! Thats awesome and Good luck!
I am glad that I could be of service to you guys 🙂
Cheers bro 🙂
Thank you Very Much. I was looking for an article like this. I am sure this is gonna help me in future (You know it right!) .
I know mate, you badly need a WordPress blog. Hope you make it soon!
This post is great. I like it so much.
Thanks for sharing. I will keep folowwing you blog.
You are most welcome 🙂
Wordpress is the best, no question about it..
Thanks for the good words and for dropping by… 🙂
Arun you are right, but I have a different opinion on it.
page rank do not move at the same time but if 301 perma redirection is done perfectly your Pr will be passed on in the next update for sure.
Out of 4 clients I migrated last month, 2 of them has PR and both of them got their PR with this month Google PR update.
Though you are true about blog design part, but then there is something to add here and that is, if you have more then 50 blog post on your blogspot, instead of leaving them behind and with time it will be going down under search engine, is int it better to move to wordpress and keep pampering it with backlinks and anchor text technique?
I moved from blogspot to wordpress almost 6 months back and I migrated all my blogpost along, that time I though I should have started a fresh wordpress blog but now I feel it was a good decision. I respect your point of view but this is what my point of view.
Hmm, Since you are have done the job first hand and tasted the results, you should be right. When I shifted I didn’t want to delete the old one, I was not feeling good thinking of it that way. Maybe we should give up our dislikes for the greater good.
But I don’t think that traffic goes down, in my case, traffic and Adsense has improved on my Blogger blog and on some months the Blogger one makes more money than this one here.
I appreciate your points. Hope someone who reads this before making a decision finds it useful 🙂