How to Migrate from Blogger to WordPress without Loosing the Traffic and almost no Downtime (Updated)

Blogger is a wonderful free platform to start your blog. It is easy for a beginner to start with blogger, but sooner or later one would want full control on their blog. Shifting or Migrating the blog from blogger would generally result a noticeable drop in Google rankings and there by the traffic if you don’t configure things properly. But here in this step by step guide I will help you migrate from Blogger to WordPress without loosing traffic and search engine rankings.

Why you should move your blog from Blogger to WordPress?

I might be a little harsh over here but lemme tell you the truth. If you are blogging on Blogger platform you need to migrate your blog right away to WordPress or else you would be loosing a lot in terms of traffic, SEO and revenue. Blogger is good to get started but you should not stick to it for a longer time. You should move your blog right away from Blogger to wordpress in order to progress.

Few more reasons why Blogger is not recommended for Blogging:

1. Blogger is owned by Google and they have complete rights over your blog. They might change anything suddenly without informing and they also have the right to delete your blog at any point of time which happened in my case as well.
2. Blogger cannot be customized the way you want. Its easy to customize blogger but again it has several restrictions.
3. Blogger is optimized to some extent by default but WordPress blogs are more SEO optimized.
4. The only advantage of blogger is it can handle unlimited traffic as it is in cloud and free hosting provided by google. But unfortunately there are chances of your blog getting deleted if you receive high traffic even without informing you in prior.

Things you need before getting started with WordPress:

1. A Good Hosting Provider:

WordPress blogs are self hosted, for this purpose you need a good and reliable hosting provider to host your blogs. If you are just getting started and your blog doesn’t has much traffic then I would recommend you to go with some good shared hosting like Bluehost. But if you are looking forward to move to a very reliable hosting then you can contact me, I will suggest you the best hosting provider.

2. Cloudflare account (Optional):

Though its optional I would highly recommend you to have a good CDN like Cloudflare. It has many advantages.

1. Cloudflare saves your blog from serious threats like DDOS and other security threats.
2. Its a CDN so will decrease the load on your server and boosts the blog loading time. Once you configure your blog with cloudflare, the blog will load a lot faster than before.
3. Pointing is easy with Cloudflare. Once you point using A names it takes effect instantly and you can migrate the blog without downtime.

Steps to Migrate From Blogger to WordPress:

Method 1:

Step 1 : Import your Blogger Blog to WordPress

To import your Blog to WordPress, go to Tools-> Import and then click on Blogger.

A pop-up will appear, asking you to install blogger importer plugin. Click on the Install button. Once it is installed, activate the plugin and Run Importer link to continue.

You will be redirected to another screen where you need to authorize WordPress to import your Blog. Click on Authorize button on this page, which will take you to your Google Accounts page. Then you will be notified that WordPress is requesting permission to manage your Blogger account. Click on Allow access button.

Now you will see the list of your Blogger blogs. Just click on the import button next to the blog you want to import.

Once WordPress imports all your posts from blogger, you need to assign an author to the imported posts.

You have successfully imported your Blogger blog to WordPress..! But you still need to make sure that you don’t loose any search rankings and visitors to your old blog.

Step 2 : Setting up Permalinks

From your WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings > Permalinks and then select Custom Structure option. Paste the following value next to it and save changes.

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

Step 3 : Setting up Redirection

This is the most important step in moving any blog so that users are redirected to your new blog. You would want users to land on exactly the same page on the new site and also want the search engines to notice that your old site is moved to new location.

You need to setup redirection on two levels. First, redirect blogger visitors to your new WordPress blog. Secondly, once users reach your WordPress site you will redirect them to exact post they were accessing on your Blogger blog.

Setting up redirection on Blogger blog:

Log on to your Blogger account and go to settings. Click on Template.

On the template page, scroll down to bottom and click on “Revert to Classic Template” link.

After that, you will see “Edit Template Html” text area. You need to replace the entire code with the following code.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="<$BlogLanguageDirection$>">