How to Migrate from BlogSpot to WordPress (An Easy Guide)

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Migrate from BlogSpot to WordPress
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When I started my Blogging career, I started with BlogSpot, and it’s always a wise idea to start with zero investment when you are a complete newbie.  After getting used to the basics of Blogging, your next destination should migrate from Blogger to WordPress.

Over time, when you get more accustomed to blogging, you will likely realize that BlogSpot is not an ideal option for your blogging future for many reasons:

  • You have less control over the SEO of your blog.
  • You can lose your blog anytime as Google holds the right to delete or ban any BlogSpot blog for a violation of their rules.
  • BlogSpot is not accepted by many advertisement networks

We have already covered the following topics in the series migrating from BlogSpot to WordPress

Here are steps you need to move from blogger to WordPress:

  1. Signup for Webhosting and domain name
  2. Export your BlogSpot blog
  3. Import BlogSpot blog to WordPress
  4. Setup Permalink on new WordPress Blog
  5. 301 redirect from Blogger to WordPress
  6. Import missed images from Blogger to WordPress
  7. final setup after migrating from BlogSpot to WordPress

How To Migrate From Blogger to WordPress: Step by step process

Before you migrate from BlogSpot to WordPress, you need two things: Domain name and hosting.

I suggest Bluehost hosting as it offers unlimited hosting with one free domain name. Moreover, it’s officially recommended by WordPress team.

1. Get Hosting

The first thing, you need now is to get the hosting and install WordPress so that you can import your content from Blogger to WordPress. I recommend Bluehost as it helps you get started quickly and offers a great hosting solution.

Moreover, Bluehost offers one free domain and right now they are running a discount for ShoutMeLoud readers and you will get hosting for cheap.

  • Head over to Bluehost.com (Free domain + 60% Discount for a limited time)
  • Click on Get started and on the next page select basic package if you plan to host one site or plus package if you plan to build multiple sites in future.
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If you already using a custom domain name, then use that (You can claim free domain later in the future). Using the custom domain name will make your life easier to do an SEO friendly migration from blogger to WordPress.

See my below notes for the domain name, in case if you planning to get a new one.

Domain name

Domain name can be .com, .info, .org, .net but I will suggest go for .com or .org domain address. Do read

If you buying hosting from companies like Bluehost, then you are getting the domain for free. If not, you can buy a domain separately from any of this web-hosting as well.

There are few things needed to be taken care of while moving from BlogSpot to WordPress

  1. Traffic: You don’t want to give lots of 404 error pages to your visitors.
  2. 301 perma-redirection: The migration should be 301 perma-redirection or have a canonical tag, else you will lose your existing search engine ranking.
  3. Permalinks: BlogSpot permalink and WordPress permalinks are not the same, and it’s important that you fix permalink after importing everything to WordPress.

Some important things to keep in mind while migrating:

  • After migration, don’t delete your BlogSpot blog.
  • 301 permanent redirection means telling the search engine that your blog is moved to a new website, and all your traffic will automatically redirect to a new domain address.

Our goal for BlogSpot to WordPress migration:

  • Migrating visitors from BlogSpot to WordPress
  • Migrating BlogSpot posts to WordPress
  • Migrating BlogSpot Comments to WordPress
  • Redirecting users to the post, rather than just homepage of the new domain
  • Migrate Feedburner feeds
  • Migrate BlogSpot Images to WordPress
  • import blogger to WordPress with images

2. Export your BlogSpot blog (Just for precaution)

The method that we are using is straightforward with little manual works. But it works great. The very first step you need to do is exporting your BlogSpot blog. To do this, log into your BlogSpot dashboard, Click on Settings > Other & click on backup content.

Export BlogSpot blog
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Click on download blog & it would save your blog in the .xml format. With this, you have taken a complete backup of your BlogSpot blog & now you need to move your blog to WordPress.

Let the game start: Migrating BlogSpot blog to WordPress 

If you haven’t installed WordPress, follow this guide & install WordPress on your Bluehost account. Do remember, your domain is not yet pointing to Bluehost, but we can still do everything without changing the nameserver.

This is little technical but very easy with this guide. All you need to do is edit your host’s file to point the domain to your Bluehost hosting I.P. If you are on Mac, you can use free Gas mask app to quickly edit the hosts’ file. If you are on Windows, you can search for a guide on editing hosts file in Windows.

Once you have edited the host’s file, you would be able to access your WordPress blog on Bluehost. Do remember, this is only you who can see WordPress blog, for now, for everybody else, they will be accessing BlogSpot blog only. (We will do the switch once we done the migration). This way, your blog will not be down even for a minute.

Few things to do inside your WordPress dashboard:

  • Go to plugins & disable all plugins
  • Go to posts> You will see Hello World post> Delete that
  • Go to Pages> You will see sample Page> Delete that

Once this is done, let’s start migrating all content from BlogSpot to WordPress. Do remember, in this scenario, our target is not to lose existing ranking & traffic. So, grab the cup of coffee & follow the steps & within no time, everything will be done.

3. Using the Blogger importer Extended Plugin:

This is a great plugin that migrated all your posts, pages, images, comments & also maintains the formatting of your blog. There are few bugs that I will tell you later, but those are fixable in most of the scenarios. You can search Blogger importer Extended from the dashboard, or you can download directly from here.

Once installed & activated the domain, go to plugin settings that will bring a screen like this:

Blogger Importer Extended
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Click on Ok, let’s go & this will ask for access to your BlogSpot account. Click on Allow & on the next page it will list all the BlogSpot blogs you have in your account.

Select BlogSpot blog to import
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This will bring up a screen like this, and you need to click on Start Import

Import BlogSpot blog to WordPress
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Do notice the checkbox in the above screenshot. Keep it checked as it will preserve the formatting & slugs.

Blog Imported to WordPress
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The easy part is done as your content is moved from BlogSpot to WordPress. Now the first thing you would be doing is to link the content to the users. If it’s single authored WordPress blog, you don’t need to do much. But if you have multiple writers, you need to create an id for them which is pretty easy. Refer to the below image:

Associate BlogSpot user to WordPress
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4. Change WordPress permalink to match BlogSpot permalink

BlogSpot WordPress Permalink
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On your WordPress dashboard settings> permalinks, change your permalinks to match with BlogSpot permalinks

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

If you have followed each step carefully, you have successfully migrated from Blogspot to WordPress with 301 permanent redirections. There are a few more steps that are required to complete the BlogSpot to WordPress migration.

  • Install & activate Smart 404 plugin
  • Remove the Cname record & A record from your domain DNS
  • Change the Nameserver of the domain to point to your hosting
  • Disable mobile template from your BlogSpot dashboard
Disable mobile template
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5. Fixing BlogSpot mobile redirect in WordPress:

This is one important thing that will cause an issue on many browsers & popular browser like Opera, UCWeb will show redirect loop error. This is happening due to BlogSpot mobile redirect. To fix this, you need to edit your WordPress .htaccess file & replace default code with the one given below:
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^m=1$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L] # END WordPress


# Begin Redirection
#Redirect archives
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{1,2})_([0-9]{1,2})_archive.html$ $1/$2/ [L,R=301] #Redirect labels/categories
RewriteRule ^search/label/(.*)$ category/$1/ [L,R=301] RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^m=1$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [R=301,L] #ATOM Feeds
RewriteRule atom.xml feed/atom/ [L,R=301] RewriteRule feeds/posts/default feed/atom/ [L,R=301] #RSS FEEDS
RewriteRule feeds/posts/default?alt=rss feed/ [L,R=301] RewriteRule rss.xml feed/ [L,R=301] #Comments Feed
RewriteRule /feeds/comments/default comments/feed/ [L,R=301] RewriteRule /feeds/comments/default?alt=rss comments/feed/ [L,R=301] # End Redirection

6. Import missed images from Blogger to WordPress:

There are times when few images are not moved to WordPress or at times, you might have hosted images on other server and since now you have your own, you should import all such images on your server.  For this, we will be using this plugin called cache images. Even though this plugin has not been updated for a while, but you should be able to use it without any issue.

Simply install the plugin like any other plugin (Learn how to install WordPress plugin here)

go to Tools > cache remote images and select option which says “Scan”. It will scan your posts and will show the list of domains from where images are hotlinked. (See screenshot)

Import BlogSpot images to WordPress
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For BlogSpot domains, you will see domains like 1.blogspot, 1.picasa and so on. Simply click on Cache from this domain, and cache plugin will start importing images from the hot-linked domain.

Personally, I use this plugin once every month as some time guest author here accidentally hot-linked images, and this plugin helps to find all those domains from where images are hot-linked, and host it back on ShoutMeLoud Server. Another good thing about Cache images plugin is, it uses AJAX to import images, so it will work on the underpowered server too.

Once this is done, your blog is successfully migrated to WordPress. After this, ensure that you do the SEO optimization of WordPress else you might lose out the traffic. Submit your sitemap, configure your robots.txt file & so on.

If you have any problem migrating from BlogSpot to WP, or other questions feel free to ask questions.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

83 thoughts on “How to Migrate from BlogSpot to WordPress (An Easy Guide)”

  1. Rishi

    i wasted my whole on day on watching serveral videos on youtube. but all are bulshit. but hrash u r great. with your article i successfully switched from blogger to wordpress in five minutes. Thankyou So Much

  2. John Mac

    Thanks Harsh your solution worked now I no longer getting 404 because of ?m=1 URL for mobile blogger now all the pages are redirected correctly.

  3. Uwais Solkar

    I faced many problems when i migrate my blog from WordPress to Blogger but when i read this article my problems are solved..thank you so much

  4. Isaac Inegbenehi

    Very simple article… I follow the steps and I was able to help someone migrate from blogger to WordPress without any issue. Thanks for sharing this wonderful piece

  5. kajal

    Hello sir work is great . thanks for the exquisite put up Harsh! It helped me migrate from blogger to wordpress without any hassles. Now operating on getting an excellent DA.

  6. Christopher

    Thanks Harsh. This was really easy to understand. I was able to migrate my blog almost immediately.

    The only thing is; I don’t like the permalink settings. I don’t know if there is a way to configure it as /%postname%/ and still get the traffic juice from old blog.

  7. topper

    Hello harsh, I have been a great fan of your blog. The information you provide is so clear and understandable.
    I have a query, once I have imported my blogger to WordPress what all I need to do as your post just wrote “Submit your sitemap, configure your robots.txt file & so on.” So do you a post related to this? I wanted to confirm if my blogs SEO will affect ?

  8. Rohit

    hello,
    nice information about migration from blogger to WordPress. i follow all your direction but, but my blog recently started, bloggers blog have 50 to 60 post only, so in my case, there is no need to take more precautions..steps followed by me as per your article
    i match permalink ,
    delete all post and pages
    .html add in permalink

  9. Ifiokobong Ibanga

    Thank for this wonderful tutorial. It was really helpful for me.
    I am not a web developer but I followed this tutorial to redirect my urls.
    Thanks

  10. Somen murtem

    Thanks a lot harsh sir. I was a youtuber before but your blog converted me to become a blogger. keep it up sir. You inspired me.

  11. Naveen

    thank bro.. it so helpful..

  12. samba siva

    Harsh sir i am confused with this line :

    Remove the Cname
    record & A record
    from your domain
    DNS
    Change the
    Nameserver of
    domain to point to
    your hosting.

    My doubt is can we change the Cname record of a free .blogspot.com domain . If yes how to do it.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Samba
      You can do that for custom domain name. NOt for free .blogspot.com domain

      1. samba siva

        So harsh,

        How to migrate a free blogspot blog to wordpress. Harsh sir, i am planning to shift my blog from blogger to Wp

  13. Pramod

    Thank you so much harsh sir!

    I search many articles about bot i not found 301 redirect technique. Finally i got here.

  14. Munna Hossain

    Nice sharing.I am sure that blogger is one of the most popular and best blogging platform. It is more helpful than WordPress for the newbie bloggers. But blogger was built with some limitations. The most important factor is you have no control on your site. Google can do anything, anytime. Besides blogger customization options are not enough. On the other hand WordPress is really a smart and up to date blogging platform. It is better SEO optimized site. So you need to migrate from Blogger to WordPress. Your article will be helpful. Thanks for sharing with us.

  15. Dhiyanesh

    Hello Harsh, I started my automobile blog five years back, and purchased a custom domain early last year only. Right now, my blog (www.wagenclub.com) in blogger platform has more than 400 posts with some amount of regular traffic for select posts and topics, but I’m facing mediocre performance with less than average overall traffic or alexa ranking. I would like to move my blog to wordpress, but my question is my blog too old and heavy to do that? My posts have many images and videos content, along with internal and external links. Does that make the process any tedious? I should not lose the existing traffic as well. Help me pls.. 🙂

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Dhiyansh
      It should not be an issue. You can easily migrate your blog to WordPress. 400 posts is alright. I have moved blog with over 5K+ posts & the migration was smooth. Best of luck!

  16. Nayan Kariya

    Hello Harsh, I have done the migration from blogspot to WordPress. but now in new blog, some comments are missing after migration. So can you please tell me how to get those missing comments back?

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Nayan
      This is normal as it happens most of the time. The solution is; You need to redo the process. Usually, I won’t bother much for comments.

  17. barbara boachie

    Hi I followed all the steps but my images didnt move with the export

  18. Deepak Bagwari

    i have recently move my blog from blogger to WordPress. every post ranking on 2nd or third page which was on first page before migration. i have follow these step with 100% accuracy . can you guide me on how to manage webmaster and analytic after migration. Or is there anything which i am missing ?

  19. Deepak Bagwari

    hi Harsh
    my search level link doesn’t change after updating .htaccess file. please also guide how to manage search console and Google Analytic after migration.

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