Bloger

When I started my Bloggingcareer, I started with BlogSpot, and it’s always a wise idea to start with 0 investment when you are a complete newbie. After, getting used to the basics of Blogging, my next destination was to migrate to WordPress and after migration, I thought of sharing thismigrate from BlogSpot to WordPress guide.We have already covered following topics in the series migrating from BlogSpot to WordPress*.8 reasons why self-hosted blog is better than   free BlogSpot blogs*.How to import your blogger blog posts, comments, and user to WordPress*.Step by step guide toInstall self-hosted WordPress blog on Bluehost hostingBefore you migrate from BlogSpot to WordPress, you need two things:Domain name and hosting.I suggest Bluehost hostingas it offers unlimited hosting with one free domain name. Moreover, it’s officially recommended by WordPress team.HostingFor hosting you can pick fromany of the listed hosting companies here. For this guide we will be taking example fromBlueHostwhich is recommended by official WordPress.org team.*.BlueHost hosting(1 free domain name)Domain nameDomain name can be .com,.info, .org, .net but I will suggest go for.com or .org domain address. Do read*.Tips to select great domain namesIf you buying hosting from companies likeBluehost,InMotion Hostingthen you are getting domain for free.If not, you can buy domain seperately from any of these two popular domain registrar:*.GoDaddy*.NameCheapThere are few things needed to be taken care of while moving fromBlogSpot to WordPress1.Traffic: You don’t want to give lots of404errorpages to your visitors.2.301 perma-redirection: The migration should be 301 perma-redirection or have canonicaltag, else you will lose your existing searchengine ranking.3.Permalinks: BlogSpot permalink and WordPress permalinks arenot the same, and it’s important that you fix permalink afterimporting everything to WordPress.Some important things to keep in mind while migrating:*.After migration, don’tdelete your BlogSpot blog.*.301 permanent redirectionmeans telling the search engine that your blogis moved to a new website, and all your traffic will automatically redirect to 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 new domain*.Migrate Feedburner feeds*.Migrate BlogSpot Images to WordPressStep by step process of migrating from Blogspot to WordPressStep1: 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.View Original ImageClick on download blog & it would save your blog in the .xmlformat. 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 hosts file to point the domain to your Bluehost hosting I.P. If you are on Mac, you can usefree Gas mask appto quickly edit hosts file. If you are on Windows, you can search for guide on editing hosts file in Windows.Once you have edited the hosts file, you would be able to accessyour 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 allplugins*.Go to posts> You will see Hello World post> Delete that*.Go to Pages> You will seesample Page> Delete thatOnce 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.Using Blogger importer Extended Plugin:This is a great plugin that migrated all your posts, pages, images, comments & also maintain 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, oryou can downloaddirectly from here. Once installed & activated the domain,go to plugin settings that will bring a screen like this:Click on Ok, let’s go & this will ask for access to your BlogSpot account. Click on Allow & on thenext page it will list all the BlogSpot blogs you have in youraccount.This will bring up screen like this, and you need to click on Start ImportDo notice the checkbox in the above screenshot. Keep it checked as it will preserve the formatting & slugs.The easy part is done as your content is moved from BlogSpotto 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:Change WordPress permalink tomatch BlogSpot permalinkOn your WordPress dashboardsettings> permalinks,change your permalinks to match with BlogSpot permalinks/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.htmlIf you have followed each step carefully, you have successfully migrated from Blogspot to WordPress with 301 permanent redirections. There are 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 domain to point to yourhosting*.Disable mobile template from your BlogSpot dashboardFixing BlogSpot mobile redirect in WordPress:This is one important thing that will cause an issue on many browsers & popular browser likeOpera, UCWeb will show redirectloop error. This is happening due to BlogSpot mobile redirect.To fix this, you need to edit your WordPress .htaccessfile & replace default code with the one given below: