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!