Moving from Blogger to paid Wordpress hosting

Posted by Felix Okoli on Monday November 4, 2013 at 8:12:57:

If you've been using a blogger blog for quite a while, I'm sure you enjoyed the free web hosting while it lasted but there most likely comes a time when you'd need to move your blog away from blogger to a more independent Wordpress hosting platform. How do you do this easily without losing your already existing search engine traffic?

Well, there are lot of things to consider when moving a way from blogger and unless you really know how to do it effectively, I'd just advise that you stay put on the blogger platform.

One would have to consider maintaining your existing search engine traffic as well as your blog subscribers if you don't want to feel the negative impact of migrating.

Things to do
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- Backup your blogger blog to xml files from inside your blogger account
- Import blog posts to Wordpress from blogger
- Change feed url
- Redirect old blogger urls to your new wordpress urls.

Migrating to Wordpress
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- Register a domain name or use your existing one
- Sign up for a web hosting account that supports Wordpress
- Set your name server settings to point to your new web host
- Install Wordpress in your web hosting account
- Open your WordPress Admin Dashboard > Tools > Import > Blogger.
- Authorize WordPress to access your Blogger Account and select your blogspot.com url

Your blog posts will be migrated to the new paid wordpress blog

Migrating your subscribers
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If using feed managers like Feedburner, you should change your feed address in blogger to point to that Feedburner url else you would have to point the feed url in blogger to your new Wordpress feed url. Just go to Blogger -> Settings -> Other and choose Post Feed Redirect URL to enter the new feed url for your blog.

Redirecting your old urls
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Since your old urls in blogger would already be in search engine results and external links, it would do you well if you also redirect it so as not to lose existing organic traffic.
You can do this by placing an appropriate redirect script function in your new blog template. A website gives a good detail on how you can do this - http://www.labnol.org/internet/switch-from-blogger-to-wordpress/9707/.

How your new website will now work
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When visitors and search engines visit your old web pages, they would be redirected to the new web page and hence, you won't be losing any traffic or ranking. It would take some time for search engines to now change your old urls to the new ones. Also you feed subscribers would not be lost.