Convert from Blogger to WordPress

I recently converted this blog from Blogger (published via FTP) to WordPress. It actually turned out to be a whole lot easier than I anticipated. I’ll lay out the steps I took for you below.

Also, I should note, it was very important to me that all of my old Blogger links do a proper 301 permanent redirect to their new home on my WordPress blog. I cover this below. However, I do not cover how to convert your Blogger template to a WordPress template. I took the transition as an opportunity to create a new look for my blog. So I skipped that process.

Step 1

First! I installed WordPress on my NearlyFreeSpeech.NET hosting account. (Fact: NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is the best web host on the planet.)

Step 2

In Blogger (under Settings -> Publishing) I switched from “publish via FTP” to “publish on blogspot.com.”

Step 3

Then I used WordPress’s awesome Blogger Import feature! (Found under Manage -> Import) You’ll notice that you can not import blogger posts hosted via FTP. This is why I temporarily switched to blogspot.com.

Step 4

After the successful Import, I installed the “Maintain Blogger Permalinks” plugin. This plugin makes your new WordPress permalinks match your old Blogger permalinks. You only need to run this plugin once, then you can uninstall it.

Step 5

Now that my imported posts had their old permalinks, I took it a step further. I no longer wanted the archive folders (ie: /2006/03/) in my permalinks. Nor did I want my permalinks to end with the HTML file extension (ie: .html). So I added the following to the top of my .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)\.html$ $3/ [QSA,R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Step 6

To preserve links to your old Blogger archives add the following to the top of your .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{1,2})_([0-9]{1,2})_archive.html$ $1/$2/ [QSA,R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Optional Step 7

During your Blogger import into WordPress, all of your Blogger “labels” are converted into WordPress “categories.” So if you want to maintain any old links to your old labels, add the following to the top of your .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteRule ^(labels)/([^/]+)\.html$ category/$2/ [QSA,R=301,L]
</IfModule>

I say this is optional because after I got my posts into WordPress, I immediately started changing all my categories and tags. So the precaution I took above turned out to be not very helpful. Oh well.

The End!

That about sums it up. It was a pretty easy transition. Of course I’ve spent hours setting up and tweaking my new template, and I’ve spent countless more hours playing with all the cool community created plugins. I just can’t help myself.

Drop me a comment if this was helpful to you! 🙂

12 thoughts on “Convert from Blogger to WordPress

  1. This is a perfect Step-By-Step-How-To. This will be a great article for someone who has outgrown Blogger. It begs the question, why switch from Blogger to WordPress. I just switched from WordPress to Blogger, and I wish I had something similar for the process. Blogger has some quirks in it’s wysiwyg, lacks a recent posts, and lacks pages. I still think Blogger.com is better a blog than WordPress.com because it has the ability to insert any html/javascript code as a widget. Blogger.com is faster and easier and has post by email. WordPress clearly is more advanced, but it really requires a hosting solution to use it’s power.

  2. Hey Dusty – thanks so much for this guide. It’s really helpful. So far, my migration has gone pretty well, but for some reason I can’t figure out why the archive links aren’t preserved. I’ve followed your instructions and added the code to the htaccess file. Just off the top of your head, can you think of anything that I might be missing on the archive side?

    Thanks again!

  3. Wow – it seems so easy… I am thinking about moving over from typepad to wordpress (support those houston boys)… but am scared to even check into it for all the time it may require. This post gives me hope!

  4. Thanks so much Dusty. I (like other custom domains) am being forced to make a move to blogspot or another platform. I want to keep the URLs as same as possible and I have a lot of custom php that doesn’t translate to blogspot. My 7 years of blogging make my backup from blogger too big (7.2MB) to import. I didn’t know wordpress can import direct from the blog, so I hope this works.

    Brilliant!

  5. I have a question still… It might be a stupid question but I’m completely new to this stuff…

    If I convert my Blogger account to WordPress, will my blog URL change to “myblog”.wordpress.com as well? Is there any way just to change the input to my blog to wordpress but leave the URL the same?

    Hope someone can answer it, thanks!

  6. can we have the same blogger template on wordpress self hosting??
    I wanna switch from blogger to wordpress… but I didn’t want to lose my blogger template… is there a way to do that??

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