It is increasingly common to want to migrate from Blogger to WordPress, due to all the versatility and flexibility that it offers you. Let’s see how to do it!

What is Blogging?

Blogger is Google’s blogging platform. It is great to start making a free blog without complicating your life, but at the same time it is very limited in many aspects.

And that is why on many occasions someone who starts on Blogger or WordPress.com wants to later switch to WordPress.org, which is much more powerful, flexible, and which also allows you to add plugins, modifications, and customizations.

If what you want is , take a look at this other tutorial, or maybe you want to know the . And once you make the change, I recommend the .

In any case, today we are going to see how migrate from Blogger to WordPress without losing positioning. And it is not enough to migrate the information, but we must also migrate the “SEO”, so to speak, in the event that our blog in Blogger has positioned itself.

Export your content

The first thing is to migrate the content. We must export everything we have in Blogger and then pass it to WordPress. To do this we will go to our Blogger account, and within the “Settings” menu, we will select “Make content backup”.

Next, a dialog box will appear that will ask us if we want to save all the data on our computer. We say yes, and continue.

This will download an XML file to our computer, of the style blog-dd-mm-yyyy.xml as we see below:

With this we have saved all our posts in a format called XML, which works through special tagging. We should not try to open it to read it, because it is not prepared to be read by people, but by other software.

Now that we have it, let’s go to the second step: Import it to WordPress.

Import Blogger content to WordPress

Next we go to our WordPress, and in “Tools” we select the “Import” option. Of all the possibilities that it offers us, we will select “Install now” in Blogger.

This process is very fast, we will simply see how the orange arrows rotate, and then the link will change to “Run importer”. We click, and we will see the following screen:

There we must select the XML file with the backup copy of all our posts that we just made from Blogger. Next we click on “Upload file and import”, and we will see the following author options screen:

As we can see, it gives us 3 options

import author: This will create a new author and give it ownership of the imported content.
Create a new user: This will create a user with the name that we tell him and assign the content to him.
Assign to an existing user: This will assign the content to a user that we already have on our website.

If it is a personal blog, the most normal is the last option, since we will already have our user created. But for blogs with many authors, the option to import users will save us time.

Migrate positioning

Well, at first it might seem that we are already there, since we already have the content in our WordPress. We should just “close” Blogger, and that’s it, right?

Well, although we could do it, it is not advisable, since if we leave it here, we will lose all the positioning, since Google does not know that we have migrated. So, if we simply close the Blogger blog, when Google sees that there is nothing there anymore, it will remove us from its results.

To avoid that, we will need to set up a redirect so that Google knows that “we have moved”, and so that users who go to the Blogger blog are automatically redirected to our new WordPress.

Redirects should always be from the source page, in this case, Blogger. So, we return to our blog in Blogger, and in the “Template” option, we will select “Edit HTML”.

And attention, because here we will have to modify all the code. So, we delete it, and replace it with this other one:

<$BlogPageTitle$> http://your-new-url.com/” /> http://your-new-url.com/?blogger=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>” />

http://your-new-url.com/“><$BlogTitle$>

http://your-new-url.com/?blogger=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>“><$BlogItemTitle$>

<$BlogItemBody$>

Above all, let’s not forget to change the URL in red to your own new URL. Do not leave the “your-new-url” thing, but there you must put your domain. You give it to save, and ready.

Next we go to our WordPress, and add the following code:

function jb-import-blogger( $vars ) { $vars = “blogger”; return $vars; }

add_filter(‘query_vars’, ‘jb-import-blogger’);

function blogger_template_redirect() {
global $wp_query;
$blogger = $wp_query->query_vars;
if ( isset ( $blogger ) ) {
wp_redirect( get_wordpress_url ( $blogger ) , 301 );
exit;
}
}

add_action( ‘template_redirect’, ‘blogger_template_redirect’ );

We can place this code in functions.php, in your custom plugin, or in a collection of snippets. In the class you can see through video tutorials the pros and cons of each option, and see how to do it step by step.

Redirect feeds

One last point that we must modify are the feeds. If you have several followers through RSS (via apps like Feedly or Reeder) and you don’t update it, they will never receive your new blog updates again, since we have not redirected the feed.

To do this we simply have to go once more to the Blogger settings, and in the “Site feed” section we will write our new feed URL in “Post feed redirect URL”.

In WordPress the feed URL is simply the URL of the web by adding “/feed” after it. For example, in my case, it would be https:///feed/. So, there you put yours.

And now yes, everything migrated: Content, positioning and subscribers. Now we can rest, and wait for Google to index our brand new WordPress website.

Summary and conclusion

If we want to migrate from Blogger to WordPress, we need to export the Blogger content in an XML file and import it into WordPress.

Also, in order not to lose positioning, we will have to establish redirects from Blogger to WordPress with a bit of code.

Finally we will have to redirect the feed so as not to lose those subscribers who follow us through RSS.

And as always, if you want to learn more about this fantastic CMS now that you’ve just installed it, don’t miss the . More than 6044 videos at your disposal 😉