Finally, the move is over and believe me, the entire exercise was quite overwhelming to the point that I would sometimes wonder if all the effort was worth it. But now since I have moved my posts from Blogger to WordPress, it’s quite a wonderful feeling of freedom. I may have otherwise stuck to Blogger, as it was something that Google ran & could be indexed easily which means it would be less painful from the SEO perspective, but WordPress offered more freedom, it being the need of the hour, the change was inevitable. But what are those freedom?? Read on…
1. Themes
The key was the availability of multiple themes – free and premium. With Blogger, I was stuck to few very old themes, which offered less flexibility in terms of customisation, which becomes important as the number of readers grow
2. Plugin/Widgets
Agree, even Blogger has plugins/widgets, but if you compare the sheer number that are available between Blogger and WordPress, the later is much ahead. I guess, since WordPress is a open-source blogging platform, developers are quite excited to build products supporting it.
3. Hosting
With WordPress, I have the flexibility of hosting it on the provider of my choice, whereas with Blogger, it being a free platform hosted with Google, I had limited control over it.
Though I assume that since you’re reading this post, you have already done your research and have decided to move. Over the next few paragraphs, I would like to share the details on how easy it is to accomplish the move from Blogger to WordPress.org
a. Create domain
One of the first step towards achieving your goal of having a self-hosted blog is to get a domain name, in case you still do not have one. The simpler domain names – .com or .org are usually priced at around $3 per year and could go on to $150 per year if you are looking at some fancier geo specific domains.
b. Decide the Host
The second step would be to self-host a blog and you will need to choose a good hosting service provider with a plan that would support PHP, MySQL. This blog uses GoDaddy (you may use the link here and get about 20% off on your hosting needs) as a provider, though WordPress hav give a choice of few other preferred providers here.
c. Setup WordPress
The most important part is setting up the WordPress software. Many of the leading hosting service providers now have a 1-Click Autoinstall, but even otherwise its easy to setup the software. Just you will have to note the credentials for the wp-admin account & MySQL databases.
d. Move Posts
The biggest stumbling block for someone moving between platform is to move their existing content. WordPress gives an option though to accomplish this easily. Just go to Dashboard –> Tools –> Import. Choose Blogger and it will take you to Google Accounts, where you’ll need to assign permissions to WordPress. This step could fail in case you have a huge number of post, so there’s an alternative too.
Click here and download ‘Blogger Importer’. Or you can go to Dashboard –> Plugins –> Add New and search for this plugin. Activate the plugin and it will authenticate your Blogger account and migrate the posts and comments. Remember, images cannot be migrated with this plugin and you might have to keep the blogger account for a while to have the images appearing in your post.
One more step is to download the Blogger posts. Just go to the Blogger Dashboard –> Settings –> Other and choose ‘Import Blog’. It will download all your posts in an XML file. Now go to http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com/ and upload the xml file. It will convert the Blogger XML file to the format recognized by WordPress. Once the conversion process is over, go to WordPress Dashboard –> Tools –> Import and select ‘WordPress’. Upload the just converted file and all your posts shall now appear on the new WordPress Page.
Hope, the above steps would have help you to successfully move from Blogger to WordPress. Congratulation!!
Drop a note to me if you face any issue. I did have my set of challenges while moving the posts and am right now working on preserving the search engine rankings and all the other information that has gone to the search engines. Will share an update on it shortly too.
Also share your new address and would be keen to visit the new blogging destination.
