Transferring from Blogger to Wordpress & My Own Domain
I recently had the unique opportunity to migrate from Blogger to Wordpress easily with some help from someone who knows how to do these things. It was a chance to edit the blog as I used to have a lot of posts about preparing for law school and other things that aren’t part of my life at the moment. I’ll still leave my old blog up at blogger, so those people who find that info useful can still access it. The process of migrating from Blogger to GoDaddy hosted Wordpress was a tad confusing so I’m posting this to help anyone else who may be considering it.
- Get a domain & hosting – there are a full set of instructions on becomeablogger.com as an easy set of 10 free videos.
- Install Wordpress – There has been a lot written on how to do this so I won’t go into this here. Either google how to do this, follow the becomeablogger.com videos or have somebody do it for you. For me, the main barrier that prevented me from doing this a long time ago was this intimidating step. Serendipity struck when I met Johnny B. Truant who setup wordpress, installed my plugins and theme and everything for me FOR FREE. His free promotion is now over, and he’s now charging a very reasonable $39 for this. The guide I linked to above has instructions on how to do this, but it is so much easier to farm this out. Then you just login and it works like blogger with a dashboard and everything ready to go. Less than an hour of your time and its all set up and beautiful. He has a separate website for his blog setup service.
- Move over your posts and comments – This is the perfect time for me to start over so I’ll be editing out a lot of my old content. I’ll leave it live on the old blogger space. There is something to be said for starting over, but I have some items that I want to keep. To actually do this just go to www.yourblog.com/wp-admin/tools.php then Import. Select Blogger from the list and enter your login information. Hit the magic info and it brings over all your posts and comments. I did manage to delete 4 posts that I didn’t mean to when editing through the old ones to refocus the content.
- Fix all your internal links. If somebody clicks on your old website post links you want them to go to the post located on your new website. To do this: Login to Blogger. Go to Settings. Select Publishing. Click the top link, “Custom domain.” They will try to sell you registration here so you have to go to Advanced Settings. Save your new address. Now all your links will transfer automatically to your own domain, but you’ll need one more step to transfer your blog home page over. Make sure you do this AFTER you transfer all your posts.
- Transfer your Google hits by redirecting direct visitors. Login to Blogger. Go to Layout. Go to Edit HTML. Place the following code anywhere after <head>: <meta content=’0; url=http://YOURNEWURL.com/’ http-equiv=’refresh’/> This sends visitors to your blog homepage directly to your new address.
- Transfer your subscribers/feed – Sign up for a FeedBurner account. Set up a feedburner feed for your new blog. Login to Blogger. Go to Settings. Go to Site Feed. In the Post Feed Redirect URL box, enter your new FeedBurner address.
Total cost $80 for a year of hosting an domain registration plus $39 if you have Johnny set you up (highly recommended). Total time spent, including editing out old posts 4 hours. Minimum amount of time needed to get up and running, 1 hour.
