Transfer Blogger to WordPress – made easy

I was looking for the easiest way to transfer Blogger to WordPress – and I have found it!  The method below is especially for someone who has A LOT of posts that they need to transfer.

There are tons of articles on the internet, some of them are in the Reference section at the bottom of this post.

Note: If you are interested, my own transfer Blogger to WordPress differently was done a bit differently.

Transfer Blogger to WordPress made easy

Transfer Blogger to WordPress – what are the End Results?

It is best to know upfront what we will achieve with this method.

This transfer Blogger to WordPress process will:

• migrate all your posts, comments, users over to WordPress. However it will not migrate your pages.
• produce a 1-to-1 mapping of all posts, for both humans and search engines.  That means, clicking on an old blogspot URL will bring you to the same page, but on your new WordPress site.  No danger of Google frowning on you for content duplication because all affected URLs are redirected to the corresponding post at your WP site.
• this also means no loss of page rank etc.
• one of the plugins we will need will have to be ALWAYS activated  for the 1-to-1 mapping to continue over time
• your old blog (at Blogger) can NEVER be deleted

Note: I also found out after the process was completed that all the Blogger’s labels have migrated as WordPress categories.  Might need to do a categories cleanup as the transfer from Blogger is complete.

My Pre-Conditions before undertaking transfer Blogger to WordPress

• already installed WordPress (self-hosting) with a top-level domain (e.g. ClearlyHelena.com)
• my Blogger was originally a sub-domain to blogspot , i.e. URL with the sub-domain format: http://clearlyhelena.blogspot.com

My Steps to Easily Transfer Blogger to WordPress as easily as possible

1) Change  WP Permalinks to Reflect that from Blogger

This is an important step and we want to do this first to ensure the 1-to-1 page redirection works.

Go to WP Admin >> Settings >> Permalinks >> Custom Structure

and type in

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

and Save Changes

Transfer Blogger to WordPress: temporary WP permalink needed

(Don’t worry, we will be changing this back after we are done.)

This change will ensure that all the posts we import from Blogger into WP (WordPress) will have this permalink structure – which reflects Blogger’s structure.  Otherwise the 1-to-1 URL mapping will not work.

2) Import Blogger

Import Blogger to WordPress

This will actually install a plugin specific to which type of blog you are importing.  On clicking “Blogger”, you will see a pop-up box with the correct plugin.  Click “Install Now”.

(The plugin can be deleted when we are done.)

Once the importer plugin has been installed, Activate and Run Importer.

Activate Blogger Imported plugin

The plugin will ask you to Authorize – i.e. let WP access your Blogger account. Click the “Authorize” button.

Authorize WordPress to be able to access your Blogger

Once WP has accessed your Blogger account, you have to allow your Blogger account to “Grant Access”.

Allow Blogger to Grant Access

If you have a number of blogs in your Blogger account, they will show up next.  Select the one you want you want to import and click the “Import” button.

Import your blog into WP

It will start importing.  At some stage, the button will turn to “Set Authors”.  Click “Set Authors” to continue.

Once it has finish importing, it will ask to to map Blogger users to the current WP user.  Then save changes.

Map Blogger to WP Authors

You will then see, in your WP Admin >> Post area,  all your posts imported from Blogger. The comments would have been imported as well.  If you go to your WP (public) site, you will also see all the posts there.

Transfer Blogger to WordPress – Done!

But ….

We have now copied all our Blogger posts to our WP site.  Note that the original posts are still at Blogger.  Which is a bit of a problem because:

• we now have duplicate content, viz. more than one URL will arrive at identical content.
• any links that were in the Blogger posts that referenced blogspot will still jump right back to Blogger.  We want visitors to now stay at your new WP site instead.

So we need a 1-to-1 mapping so that any old blogspot type URL will automatically redirect to your WP site.  For both search engines and humans.

Search for “Blogger to WordPress” plugin

3) Install Blogger to WordPress plugin

We need the “Blogger to WordPress” plugin.

Go to WP Admin >> Plugins >> Add New

.. and do a search for “Blogger to WordPress”

Check plugin carefully. There are more than one by this name.  So click on the details-link of the plugin. We want the “Blogger to WordPress” plugin, authored by rtCamp.  (This might also be in the description column).

“Blogger to WordPress” plugin by rtCamp

Don’t worry about the version.  There might be a later version by the time you read this post.

Install the “Blogger to WordPress” plugin.  There is also a link to instructions for this plugin: Blogger To WordPress Redirection Plugin

Install the plugin, then Activate it.  You can then access it via: WP Admin >> Tools >> Blogger To WordPress Redirection >> Start Configuration 

Note: This plugin must always be left activated to ensure all the redirections work.

Blogger to WordPress plugin – start configuration

After you press “Start Configuration”, the plugin will automatically detect the Blogger Blogs you had earlier imported.  Click the “Get Code” button.

Blogger to WordPress plugin – Get Code

It will generate “template code” which we need to copy and replace in our (old) Blogger blog.

Blogger to WordPress: Generated Template Code

4) Backup the template of your blog at Blogger

Because we will be replacing ALL the template HTML code over at Blogger, it is best to make a backup first of the affected blog’s template.

Go to your Blogger admin area >> select the relevant blog (that we imported earlier into WP) >> click “Backup/Restore” button at top right. Then in next window, Click “Download full template”.  Take a note of where you save it to so that you can find it in case you need to restore the original template.

How to backup template of blog on Blogger

5) Copy Generated Code over to Blogger

Now that you feel safer having a backup of your (Blogger) blog’s template, let’s go back to WP Admin to get the generated  code from the (“Blogger to WordPress”) plugin.

Copy the generated code:

Blogger to WordPress: Generated Template Code

Go back to Blogger >> your specific blog >> Templates >> Edit HTML

Blogger Template – Edit HTML

Paste the plugin’s Generated Code, entirely replacing the code in Blogger’s Edit Template tab.  Then Save Template.

replace Blogger template code with your generated code

Go back to your WP Admin, to where you left your “Blogger to WordPress” plugin.  Now we just need to verify configuration.

Verify Configuration to check success

Clicking the “Verify Configuration” button will ..

generate some random links for you to check that the URL redirections resulting from the transfer Blogger to WordPress procedure all works.

Tip: If you encounter any problems, rtCamp (author of the Blogger to WordPress plugin) has kindly set up a forum where you can go for help: Blogger to WordPress Forum.

Clean Up after Completing Transfer Blogger to WordPress process

Once everything works correctly, we can cleanup.

1. Change your WP permalink custom structure to /%postname%/
2. Deactivate and Delete the “Blogger Importer” plugin.  (NOT the “Blogger to WordPress” plugin – which you must keep activated).

Transfer Blogger to WordPress – Why I did mine Differently

I do believe that if your Blogger blog has lots and lots of posts, then the outlined method above is the best and easiest way. Though I have laid out the steps for you above with every intention to do the same myself, in the end, I modified what I did.

It was only towards the end of this whole process that I discovered:

• I had to keep the “Blogger to WordPress” plugin activated FOREVER.  (Here I have noted that fact for you way early on so that you know that this is one of the end results).
  I am not happy to have the plugin activated all the time because I know how undesired results can happen either from update of this plugin, or another plugin, or even as a result of a WordPress upgrade.
  If you have a huge number of posts in your old Blogger (like maybe in the hundreds or more) – then this might just have to be something you can accept for the convenience of it.
• I don’t particularly like the idea of never being able to delete or close my old blogger.

So in the end, after importing my blogger posts to WordPress, I manually converted all my imported posts to the Draft status.  I will  update them one by one and republish them again later.  That will also give me the chance to change the post’s URL from format: yourdomain.com/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html to my preferred format: yourdomain.com/%postname%

My personal method basically meant that I only needed the first “Import Blogger” plugin and not the second.  And that “Import Blogger” plugin can be deleted once the transfer blogger to wordpress is complete.  I always like to have few plugins as possible – for both security reasons as well as to minimize the possibility of future conflicts.