Important Update: We now offer Blogger to Wordpress migration paid service where we personally take care of everything. Click here for details and free quotes!
Most bloggers who start on blogger.com realize that they should have started on wordpress first. Of course this applies to growing blogs whose potential gets limited by Blogger.com platform. Finally they decide to make a move but then comes worry of losing all traffic, pagerank, SEO, etc.
When I moved to wordpress myself more than a year ago, my lack of knowledge & experience made me loose most of the traffic & SEO juice. But few months back, when my friend Gaurav Dua decided to move his high traffic blog, OrkutPlus, we did it with 100% success. Since then this post was pending.
Actually I was looking for another real case where I can test procedure outlined below because notes I made while migrating Gaurav’s blog were lost when my dear Macbook got stolen! 
Anyway thanks to Sri, while moving symposiumz from blogger to wordpress, we did it again in following steps!
Notes & Assumption!
The guide is for moving from Blogger.com to self-hosted wordpress. There is no real benefit in moving from blogger.com to wordpress.com.
If you find self-hosting with paid registered domain name is costly affair, you better stick to blogger.com. Also, all screenshots in this post are taken with wordpress 2.7.
Step 0: Add your custom domain name to blogger
Blogger gives you a subdomain like something.blogspot.com by default. They also give you option to use your own custom domain name. If you are using your own domain name on blogger then jump to next step!
Now if you are not in hurry to move to wordpress, you better register custom domain right now on Blogger. Blogger will automatically transfer all permalinks and SEO to your custom domain. It may take around 2-3 months for major search engines to update your blogs’ permalinks in their index.
You can google for site:something.blogspot.com and site:mydomain.com where something is subdomain given by you blogger and mydomain is domain registered by you. When all links get updated you will see zero result for subdomain query while many results for custom domain query. Do not forget to use site: operator as it is in your query. (more about Google search operators)
I know this step is very time consuming, but this is the only way not to loose your pagerank, most of the traffic and SEO juice. Rest we can move all traffic and maintain permalinks using wordpress plugin/hack I have posted around a year ago!
Step 1. Setup a dummy wordpress blog
You need to setup a dummy wordpress blog. You can set it on localhost or wordpress.com or anywhere else on internet. Wordpress.com is not recommended. First, if you have multiple authors/contributors on your blogger.com, you may be interested in creating different users for each of them on wordpress. Wordpress.com doesn’t allow this.
Also in step 5 below, you will need FTP access to your wordpress blog which is again not possible. Technically you can perform step 5, after setting up final wordpress blog on your webhost but it may create problems, so not recommended. Drop wordpress.com from options list.
There are many guides for installing wordpress locally (official link). For Mac users, there is an official guide as well. You can checkout video tutorials as well!
Step 2: Configure permalinks on locally installed wordpress
From wordpress dashboard, go to Settings >> Permalinks and select Custom Structure option. Paste following value next to it and save changes.
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
This will make your wordpress blogs permalink structure looks like blogger.com blog. Do not use any other permalink structure at this time. You can change your permalinks structure safely using permalink migration plugin in future. Note the power of wordpress! 
Step 3: Import Blogger.com blog to local wordpress
Now its time to import your Blogger.com blog to local wordpress. Log into wordpress dashboard, go to Tools >> Import and select Blogger form importing options you will see.
Now you must be on “Import Blogger” page with a button named “Authorize”. Click on it and you will be taken to a page on Blogger.com (actually Google.com) where you will be prompted to Grant access to your Blogger account. You may be prompted to log into your Google account if you are not already logged in.
Once you grant access, you will be taken back to Blogger importer on local wordpress installation. If you have more that one blog on your Blogger account, you will see all listed there. Just click on “import” button next to it.
Once you click import, all posts and comments form Blogger.com blog starts importing into wordpress. Importer may stop in between. In that case text on button will change from “import” to “continue”. Keep clicking on it, till button-text doesn’t change to “Set Authors”, which indicates all posts and comments are successfully imported.
Next if you have more than one author, you may need to add users on your wordpress blog. Or you can optionally merge all posts for one author. Either way go ahead and hit Save Changes!
At this point, your Blogger.com blog is completely imported. But wait, your images hosted on Bloggers’ server are still there so don’t delete your Blogger.com blog. I will tell you what to do with Blogger.com blog soon!
Step 4: Changing DNS settings for your domain name
This step can be delayed as we are not done with local wordpress yet. But changes in DNS settings propagates slowly across Internet. So to avoid waiting at step 7, better we initiate DNS settings change right now.
How to access and change DNS settings vary from registrar to registrar. Consult your registrars help pages or contact them if you stuck. As far I know, you should only need to change nameservers part. For Dreamhost, nameserver values are NS1.DREAMHOST.COM, NS2.DREAMHOST.COM & NS3.DREAMHOST.COM.
Also you need to flush your computers DNS cache periodically till you don’t see your Blogger.com blog is gone from your custom domain! Please use Google to know how to flush DNS cache for your operating system.
Step 5: Fixing permalinks for imported post
In step 2, we configured permalink structure which makes permalinks look similar to Blooger.com permalinks. But we need to make them identical to retain all our traffic & SEO!
Look at below wordpress post link:
http://localhost/wp3/2009/01/national-conference-on-advanced-computer-systems-ncacs-09-hindustan-college-of-engineering.html
And following blogger.com post link for same post:
http://www.symposiumz.net/2009/01/national-conference-on-advanced.html
Ignore domain-name for the time being. We need to make wordpress links look like:
http://localhost/wp3/2009/01/national-conference-on-advanced.html
At this point you can use following php script. Just copy-paste following codes into a file with name like fix.php and save/upload it to wordpress folder. Then just open its URL form browser. URL will be like: http://localhost/wp3/fix.php
<?php
require_once('wp-load.php');
$res = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT post_id, meta_value FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key = 'blogger_permalink'");
$wpdb->print_error();
foreach ($res as $row){
$slug = explode("/",$row->meta_value);
$slug = explode(".",$slug[3]);
$wpdb->query("UPDATE $wpdb->posts SET post_name ='" . $slug[0] . "' WHERE ID = $row->post_id");
$wpdb->print_error();
}
echo "DONE";
?>
On executing this script, only output you must see is “DONE”. If you see any error, please contact us, of course using comment form below.
At this point, check permalinks (post links) on your local wordpress installation. Their path part must be identical now to blogger.com permalinks.
Step 6: Exporting local wordpress blog
At this point, we are done with local wordpress installation and ready to move our setup to online wordpress on our webhost.
Again go to wordpress dashboard, then go to Tools >> Export and click “Download Export File”.
This will create a XML file. Keep it safe as we will need it soon!
Now its time to wait till DNS change mentioned in step 4 gets completed. We need DNS to point to our webhost so that we can install wordpress on our new domain.
Still, if your are using a good webhosting service you can complete step 7 even before DNS settings gets updated over web.
Step 7: Preparing your Webhost…
You need to add your blogger.com domain on your webhosting account. DNS shouldn’t create a problem at this stage.
You can also install (actually upload) wordpress without any DNS issue. Also upload themes you are planning to use on your new wordpress blog.
There is no tool which can import bloggers theme on wordpress. You can either choose a wordpress theme which matches your blogger template closely or code a wordpress theme yourself. If you need wordpress theme designer, you can hire me! Contact us for more details.
Step 8: Moving from local wordpress to wordpress @ your domain
Now at this point, I assume, DNS change has been completed. Now you are able to see empty wordpress blog on your custom domain.
Now first, follow step 2 and configure permalink on your new blogs.
Then like in step 3, go to Tools >> Import but select Wordpress this time. Upload XML file we saved in step 6 and just follow next few steps.
Thats it! You are on new wordpress now!
Step 9: Miscellaneous but important…
Testing new wordpress’ permalinks & SEO
Just google for site:mydomain.com where mydomian.com is your domain name. Click on any link from search results and you should land on correct post on your new wordpress blog.
What to do with Blogger.com blog now?
First, swear that you will never delete your (now) old Blogger.com blog! 
Now you go back to Blogger.com’s custom domain settings and revert back to your old subdomain there. Next follow instruction posted here.
At the end of those instructions:
- Your Blogger.com blog will become inaccessible. This is must for good SEO!
- Your Blogger.com subdomain will be active again but all visitors will be migrated with proper permalink structure.
2nd part is important if you have used your Blogger.com for sometime in the beginning. In that case, you must be having non-search engine links form other blogs all over the web. It will be insane if you to contact each blogger/author and ask them to edit their posts. Instructions listed there will take care of such human permalinks forever & automatically!
Moving feed subscribers…
If you are using Feedburner or any third party service for subscribers, update source feed URL as it will be changed with migration. If you don’t use feedburner you can still use .htaccess hack to fix URL of your feed.
Just add following lines at the top of your .htaccess file which can be found in root directory of your wordpress installation.
RewriteRule atom.xml /feed [L,R=301]
RewriteRule rss.xml /feed [L,R=301]
Migrating other codes…
All other codes you use on blogger like in sidebar widgets, adsense, stats-tracking code need to be migrated manually from blogger.com to wordpress.
Enjoy wordpress!
Wordpress have tons of plugins to make your life easier and richer! You must be new on wordpress so rather than burdening yourself with thousands of plugins, you can start with our wordpress plugin series which covers some of the best wordpress plugins.
If something goes wrong…
Please use comment form here for migration related queries. Use our forum for your other wordpress doubts.
Also if you find any mistake in this post, please update about it via comment form below.
This is very lengthy process, so do not expect me to personally handle your migration for free! 
(image credit: Digital Inspiration)
Related posts:
- Blogger To Wordpress Traffic & Permalinks Redirection Plugin
- Moving a Wordpress blog from a subdirectory to subdomain preserving permalinks
- Blogger allows creating pages: Will it stem the migration to WordPress?
- Traffic Stats and Analysis of 2008
- 4 Wordpress Plugins for Better SEO and Permalink Structure
First of all,
Thanks Rahul for shifting my blog from blogger to wordpress for “FREE”
“Anyway thanks to Sri, while moving symposiumz from blogger to wordpress, we did it again in following steps!”
Technically, it was Rahul who did everything from step one till end for me.. I did nothing but to give access to my accounts to Rahul.
So there is no “we” there.. It was Rahul, Rahul and Rahul only.
“This is very lengthy process, so do not expect me to personally handle your migration for free!
”
He spent the whole day in this job and completed it for me. I didn’t even know what process was happening until I saw this post. It would have been really hectic for Rahul to complete this. And I don’t think anyone would spare their time and help like Rahul did.
I already owe a treat to Rahul for getting me Dreamhost account at a very low price (New year offer) and now another one.
And now, I am too a part of “Wordpress Community”
Let me play with it for some time…
Thanks again Rahul…
stunning… maan gaye yar tum logo ko… kudos… I knew everything except that awesome KEEP BLOGGER URL SAME trick… god bless you man…
Rahul helped me too to migrate from blogger to wordpress..
I am attached with blogging world since last 2 years, even I didn’t find any one as helpful as Rahul and Pavan. This two guys really deserves a BIG thanks from co-authors and bloggers
Thanks for the post Rahul!
Post bookmarked
I guess if I ever decide to migrate to WordPress (from Blogger) I’ll keep you mind.
~Darnell
i was waiting for this post for a long time thnx
That’s really awesome dude. This is the most useful post, but not at all useful for all
. Even there are no official tutorials for this. You have done it.
Glad that devil is back
Thanks for the detail information. I already moved from blogger to wordpress and your article will help me a lot to improve seo for my site.
Lovely great tutorial !!
Thank you all for your encouraging comments…
@Darnell
Would love to help you with migrating InsideOrkut.
Thanks a lot. I always wished to moved WP. I even purchased hosting but due to lack of any good tutorial I couldn’t do that.
Now, going to try it.
@Arpit
Best of luck buddy!
You will enjoy wordpress for sure.
Are you sure you are not going to loose your page rank when making this shift?
@Suyash
If you follow all above steps correctly, then you will surely not loose any traffic/rank/etc.
Two blogs I personally moved didn’t loose anything.
If you personally moved and didn’t loose anything that’s gr8. However, my point is page rank depeds on various factors such as inbound links, outbound links, sitemap SEO etc. So when you are moving from blogger to wordpress and your domain changes then I don’t think this preserves your page rank. Yeah I could support your point of not loosing traffic and SEO etc. But I doubt that page rank cannot be preserved. Are you sure about your claim on page rank too. Did you check on page rank when u personally moved your site?
@Suyesh
First let me tell specify some bullet points…
Pagerank – It is assigned on per page (URL) basis. Homepage is not an exception.
Permalink – It is permanent link to pages on your domain.
Now as long as your permalinks are maintained, URL of that page and thus pagerank is maintained.
You are switching from Blogger to Wordpress in above cases I have mentioned is internal change.
You can think of it as like changing theme/template of your blog. But the process is complex and any mistake may erase your site from search engines’ index.
If you have any more questions/doubts, please feel free to ask.
yes Rahul bro is very helpful and equal to all…
Hi, I found this post really interesting and complete, I am planning my migration for tonight (I am in Buenos Aires, Argentina) it is 9:24 PM at this moment.
I need to know only one thing, how to migrate all images in Blogger to Wordpress, I have more than 2300 posts and I will drive crazy if I have to move each image manually. I dont know if it helps but I have a copy of almost all images of all posts on a repository folder in my local computer? Does this helps to redirect all links to the new server if I upload them?
Thanks in advanced for your help
Fernando
what we need here is an additional script… a script that would pull out the first image from blogger post and make it an exercept in the wordpress of what ever is mentioned etc… if you can help on this….
Exactly that should be a new plugin, where it has to check each post in blogger, ger the url of the image, and match it to the new url in wordpress.
Its something I am driving crazy to find, I dont know who to ask for something like this…It would be really great!
@Fernando
I am aware of this image issue and this is the reason I asked not to delete blogger account.
I am already working on scripts (plugin) you have suggested.
@Pushpinder
Check our homepage for image-based excerpts. If you want something like that, it can be done irrespective of where images in posts are hosted.
If you want that kind of functionality, let me know.
Rahul, great news! When do you think you will get it to work?
Thanks in advance!
Fernando
What I need is to move a blogger blog to a wordpress one but I want excerpt to be made to each post with the first image of the post or if there is no image then a default one… can you please help me with a plugin or a script to do that ?
@Pushpinder: Basically you need the same thing as I need and that there is nothing arround.
We need to:
- Import all Posts from Blogger to Wordpress to temporary installation/domain different from the one you will finally use, this already can be made without any trouble. Except images.
- Then if you establish permalinks to manatain the same structure as blogger, you have the same URLs for your posts.
- Finally what Rahul told me he is developing is a script/plugin. I imagine that the Plugin has to do the following:
1) Check each post on blogger blog and get the URLs of the images or image of each post.
2) Connect to the temporary URL where you migrated your Blogger Posts, then match the post URL and pase the code of the image to a local server Example: /images/ or update the link of the image if the plugin has the complexity of downloading and uploading the image from blogger to a wordpress directory.
I think this is the way to do it. I dont know the source files nor their behavoir…this is just theory
Thanks!
Hope Rahul has good news for us soon 
I think that if he can make this to run accordingly it would be a well used plugin.
I dont know if you know it but the only plugin to move Blogger images to wordpress that I found was:
http://notions.okuda.ca/wordpress-plugins/blogger-image-import/
But it doesnt work.
@Fernando
I dont think that we need to move all images because they are already hosted on blogger and will never be deleted so let em be there or there might be images hosted somewhere else… why move to own domain and burn useless bandwidth… only thing that worries me is an excerpt of the first image of the post plugin… there should be some solution…
@Fernando
Thanks for that plugin link. I will check it for sure.
Also wordpress core have built in ability to download externally hosted images while importing posts.
One thing is sure, for time being you can move to wordpress leaving images on blogger server.
As Pushpinder pointed out, this will not only speed up site loading but will also save your bandwidth.
@Pushpinder
Did you have a look at type of excerpts we are using on this blog’s homepage?
Do you want that only or something different?
Rahul – Can you please fix the image credit link
@Amit
Fixed it. Strangely Google image search showed that link first.
Thanks much.
Hi Rahul, did you have the chance to work on the plugin to move images from Blogger to Wordpress?
I am unable to move until I do so 
thanks a lot!!!
@Amit
My pleasure. Its really nice to see your comment on this blog.
I wish, I could figure this blogger to wordpress migration guide earlier.
Then it might have been useful to you for merging labnol.blogspot.com and labnol.org completely.
@Fernando
I am sorry for delay. I started work but there are so many things to test in codes.
So I guess it will take atleast one week.
I am trying to make independent “image importer” so you can go ahead with this guide.
Importing images will be an independent activity. No need to wait for it.
Rahul, no problem, you dont have to be sorry, its just a lot of work to get a person such as gentile as you to write down a plugin for a specific need. (Although there are a lot of people who will really love this plugin, I assure you!) I offer you the translation into spanish to make it also available in this language.
Regarding my migration, I would like to migrate and then Delete the Blog at blogger otherwise Google might also index techlatina.blogpost.com url and I want to prevent this…the thing is that first I want my posts to be exacty the way they are now into my imported posts at Wordpress.
Thanks a lot for your help, I hope I recieve good news soon
I might sound dumb but its better to ask and clear my doubts :p
Why do people sign up in blogs (wordpress blogs)? I am not talking about those RSS subscriptions or newsletter sign ups. I am talking about the wordpress user sign ups.
Do they automatically get subscribed to your posts once they join your blog? What’s the logic behind this?
Thanks in advance.
@ Rahul Bansal: Thanks for sharing… I got the solution for moving blogger to WordPress. Let me check…?
I wish I’d known this earlier, I shifted my blog from Blogger to Wordpress and deleted by blog at blogger! This has resulted in a couple of deadlinks in the search engine index. Sigh!
Thanks for the excellent tutorial here. I recently switched from blogger to wordpress using your instructions. Instead of redirecting traffic from my blogger blog, I just went in on the settings and told it not to be indexed by search engines. Are there any problems with doing it that way? Just curious. Thanks again.
Even I started my blog bloggers only. But to do quallity blogging I opened a blog in wordpress with a domain.
@ Bapun
They signup so they dont have to log back in again some people who like the blog register in it.
Hi All, I´ve just migrated from Blogger to Wordpress, but now when I want to post from Wordpress I recieve the following error:
“Your attempt to edit this post: “Here the subject of the post” has failed.
Please try again.”
Any Ideas?
In future Iam planning to move from Blogger to wordpress ,this tutorial does help me and others.
@ Aditya : Your reply does not answer my question mate. I was wondering the reasons behind registering in a wordpress blog.
Hi i am hosting on blogger blog with custom domain i am having around 40 email accounts with google apps?
My questions his if i move to dream host can i still retain my email solution with gmail?
Guys, thanks so much for this – worked liked a charm (used the suggested pretty URL structure, finalized the URLs with your fix.php script etc.)
A tip for Godaddy economy hosting users: The pretty URLs would not work on Godaddy economy hosting and I tried a lot of different things to no avail.
Only thing that worked was custom 404 error handling as described here.
Simply point Godaddy to the suggested 404 script file and you’ll get your customized pretty URLs. Click through to see it in action on my blog.
Thats a very helpful article. The permalink script was a life saver. Thanks for all that.
Just a follow up: I wrote this post about moving from Blogger to Wordpress 2.7 using Godaddy Economy Hosting which is very much based on your post here.
I know many people use Godaddy Economy hosting, and I was quite sad to find that your guide didn’t work entirely with that. But like I describe in detail, there’s an easy workaround even though Economy hosting may or may not support mod_rewrite. Hope it’s useful to someone. I also talk about why Wordpress is the more professional choice for blogging.
Thanks for a great blog, subscribing to it as we speak.
Hi everybody!
Well..I’m in the same process now… and just found your post while looking for a way to fix the image import problem. Too bad i didn’t fint the post before:P but so far i’m doing quite well.. exept for the image problem.
-Did you finally made a script for it?
-I found this one but doesn’t seem to be working now: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hot-linked-image-cacher/
-I read here that ther’s no probelm with leaving the images at blogspot.. but what about their hotlinking protection?
-Fernando, i see that your old images at techlatina arte in a subfolder wp-content/ImportedImages/. Did you find a way to do it?
Sorry for such a long comment! I did my best to keep it clean:)
@All
Sorry for all comments awaiting answer from more than a month.
I remember that I answered comment till last week but they all went to a spam because of a bug in Wordpress/Akismet described here.
@Fernando
I recently got a breakthrough with this plugin. Now my target is to make a general solution which will pull not only blogger blogspot images but all images residing on 3rd party server.
Sometimes we just link to images on other sites which goes down or expires permanently. In those cases, our posts may look ugly. So better solution is to have all images on our server only.
@Bapun
I hope you are not asking for wordpress.com blogs which is wordpress blog hosting service like Google’s blogger. You need to signup there to create new blog(s) for yourself.
Some self-hosted wordpress blog asks for registration to offer/open some features. Like some blogs makes it mandatory to register before you post comment there. Some blogs like Devils Workshop ask you to register so that you can write posts (and make money).
By default registration process has nothing to do with RSS subscription but using plugins you can send updates to registered user via emails. As blog admin you have access to email addresses of registered users.
@Vaibhav
You are not alone. Even I lost my own SEO juice and traffic when moved to wordpress. This may be useful to other but I wish I knew such things before moving to wordpress myself.
@Mike
If you were using same domain on old blog, you will not face problem.
Otherwise links to old domain may result in broken links now.
@tech geek
Google apps have nothing to do with Blogger or Wordpress. If your nameserves are going to be changed then copy CNAME and MX records from old DNS to new DNS.
If you are moving to Dreamhost or any other host which support Google apps integration from their control panel you don’t have to worry about anything.
@Martin
Glad to know that things worked for you somehow but consider using a better host like Dreamhost.
Cheap hosts have their shares of problems which surface later on.
I really can’t believe there are webhosts who do not enable ‘mod_rewrite’ on their server. I will never recommend such bad hosting package to anyone.
@Juan
I hope to solve image migration problem soon. I already checked plugin code you have linked to. I also studied few more plugins.
Its not that tough. Only thing I am lacking is time.
Rats – wish I’d had this back in January when I migrated my blog. Too late now tho & it will all sort itself out eventually. great info
@Donalyn
Glad to know I am not alone.
I wrote above post but was not aware of this myself…
Hi Rahul,
Thanks a lot for the guide, which I am implementing. The first problem I am facing is that my pagerank has gone from 4 to 0, just by applying step one.
Is this normal or the PR is gonne forever?
@ Ramon
Its k, it takes time to get your new domain indexed and takes time for google to understand that it’s a 301 perma redirection.
@Ramon
If you made a right 301 redirecton you will be getting your PR back.. but yes, it will take a cople of months.
By the way, my blog is now on WP:) Expept for the images.
Ah!
@Rahul : i found a problem with the permalinks: a few had a difference with the year/month. This is because ther’s a difference when you save a post as a draft oin a given month and then publishit on the following month. Already fixed the issue, and made a plugin for that. I’ll try to publish it soon ater i test it a little bit more. So, i’ll let you know!.
Thanks Rahul, gracias Juan
Need to change my blogging platform from blogger to wordpress.. but can not understand that where to change my nameservers in the enom login to work with dreamhost hosting on wordpress.. ? help help help
@juan
If any changes to fix.php can help solve the issue, please let us know. Thanks.
@Ramon
If you are using new domain on Wordpress then I am afraid your pagerank will not pick up soon and also it may fall.
Search engine ranking is maintained in case when you use same custom domain on Blogger and Wordpress.
@Malvinder
Contact your registrar or hosting provider for help on DNS management.
Hi, This is a great post, i am thinking to move my blogger blog to self hosted wordpress, so does that mean i wait for 2-3 months after i buy a custom domain for the purpose of smooth redirection?
I will really appreciate any kind advice from you, because i am seriously considering making a move but am quite worried about redirection and Google juice.
Thanks.
@Sonali
If you really want to retain search engine juice, please buy custom domain name and configure it at your Blogger.com account.
All needed steps and checked are already listed in above post.
Thanks Rahul. I will be buying a custom domain within couple of days. I think, the aforementioned steps will be very useful, thanks for writing them.
I will get back to here once i am ready to make a move. Btw, what domain registrar (cheap as well as compatible with my future wordpress) do you recommend? i cannot buy from blogger itself, as it doesn’t accept paypal payments.
I am in the process of switching from Blogger to WP and the one thing holding me back is maintaining my PR. I am hoping that this will work perfectly. I have been using my own domain for a few months now, and just recently got my PR back after loosing it when I switched to my own domain.
I didn’t come across this until I was already in the process though, so I have a question. First off, I already imported my blogger blog into a WP.com blog, because it would not import directly into my wordpress.org account. I then took that and imported it into my wp.org. But now I’m wondering if I need to delete everything in my wp.org and re-import it into wp.com to change the permalinks. Can I just change it in the wp.org? Right now most of the posts URLs look the same. I haven’t checked all of them, so I don’t know if there are any that are different or not.
@Sonali
Sorry for late reply.
Usually any registrar should work fine. But I always recommend Godaddy.
Also if you want some promo codes for discount on domains, please check this.
@Trisha
I am not clear about what you have done till now.
If blog you are talking about is at http://www.sweetnsassygirls.com/ you are not late for anything.
You can follow entire process described in this article right from beginning.
Please delete your posts at wordpress.com and elsewhere to save yourself from duplicate content penalty.
hi rahul, interesting post! is there an email i can contact you privately about migration to wp ? thanks
@Andrea
My email is – rahul@rtcamp.com
But it will be really nice for all if you use this posts comment section to post about your problem, if you face any along the way.
That way it will help many other!
@Rahul
I have my blogspot blog pointing to my own domain right now. I have been doing some behind the scenes work at sweetnsassygirls.com/wordpress. Right now I have that blog as a no follow while I work everything out. I will then change my DNS settings to point that blog to http://www.sweetnsassygirls.com.
Basically what I did was try to import my blogspot blog right into my wordpress.org (self hosted) account. It would not work. Looking through the forums I found I had to import it first into a wordpress.com account, and then import that one into wordpress.org. It was too big however, so I had to break it up into 3 separate XML documents and import those to my wordpress.org account. Then I deleted everything from my wordpress.com account so I didn’t have duplicate content. I did that, but then I found this tutorial. So what I’m wondering is if I need to go in and delete everything from my wordpress.org (self hosted), and then re-import my blogspot into my wordpress.com account like this tutorial says and then re-import that into my wordpress.org account (self hosted).
Or is it possible to just do step 5 in my wordpress.org account. I guess I’m just confused as to why you need to do that in your wordpress.com account first, before importing it into your wordpress.org account.
Basically just figuring out if I need to delete everything I have done so far, and start over, or if I can use what I have already done and work from there. Thanks for your help!
Oh, and right now it seems like wordpress.com can’t import a blogger blog. They did a week ago, but apparently they are currently having issues and are trying to figure out how to fix it. Just an FYI.
So I just went back and re-read the tutorial and realized you said NOT to use wordpress.com. Sorry, I mis-read that the first time.
I am still confused as to why you want to create a dummy wordpress blog. Why can’t you just do step 5 in your real wordpress blog, thus eliminating the need to create a dummy one?
Hi – I moved my blog from Blogspot to Wordpress a few weeks ago and unfortunately did not check here first. Now, when I search using site:mydomain.com for terms that I know are on my new blog, I get no results.
However, I can search using site:mydomain.blogspot.com and still get all of my same results. Tonight, I put in the redirect code from this post of yours.
Is my new blog currently being penalized because all of the content is the same as my old blogspot blog? Now that I’ve put in your redirect code on the blogspot blog, will my new blog eventually start showing up in searches? Thanks!
Serious ‘duh’ moment for me: I just saw that my Wordpress was set to block search engines. Fixed that now. Hopefully that should cover it all.
I have a custom domain. i have hosting and domain with godaddy.com
named etaxindia.net but on blogger custom domain is etaxindia.org. now plz tell can i transfer my blog with etaxindia.org. plz tell ur fees if i hire u for this work.
thanks
@Trisha
Sorry for late reply. I checked your blog again and few more things.
Here are things I want you to notice.
First, your blog is still on Blogger so do not worry about anything! (Good news)
Next, delete whatever you have imported in past to any Wordpress setup. i.e. self-hosted as well as Wordpress.com
Reason for asking to delete is that you need to import right before migration. Otherwise you may loose most recent comments and posts made at Blogger.com blog.
Now your another problem is size of import/export file at Wordpress.
Such problem occurs when your Blogger blog have hundreds of posts and thousands of comments.
There is a simple solution to modify php.ini settings ‘post_max_size’ and ‘upload_max_filesize’. Set values for them to be larger than size of your import/export file. Example values you can use are, 32M, 64M, etc.
Note that modifications to php.ini may not be allowed by some hosts. Also you need to restart your web-server.
If above is not allowed, then better install a wordpress locally on your machine, do everything locally and then import/export all wordpress database tables using phpMyAdmin.
Sorry if above all sounds way tricky! But you will find guidance and help for all above on Internet. By the way which webhost you are using to host your blog?
@Eric
Its fine Eric. We all have our ‘duh’ moments!
@Pankaj
You can transfer your blog with domain ‘etaxindia.org’.
This guide is written keeping that in mind.
I will send you detailed proposal soon on your email id.
thanks plz send detail
@Trisha
I forgot to answer your question about step 5.
This tutorial assume that you want your domain like example.com, which is previously pointing to Blogger blog, to point to your new blog @ Wordpress.
Now at any time, you can have only one blog on your domain. So if you move your domain first and then go for migration, your site may get down for long time.
So good idea is to move “blog” first and then “domain” so we need intermediate blog.
There is still a workaround but highly complex and works only on webhosts which gives you dedicated IP address.
It is way harder than using intermediate blog so I recommend using intermediate blog.
Hi Rahul, thanks for the reply.
Well, i figured out that godaddy is cheap but if you want a private whois it becomes a bit costlier, even with a coupon code. I found znetindia or name.com to be more cheaper than it.
Also, can you tell me that when i use a custom domain name for blogger blog, will that change my site’s pageranking & google search as well? Also, do i have to change my Google Analytics settings?
@Sonali
Custom domain will have same pagerank and ranking as your blogspot subdomain.
No idea about Google Analytics. Try and lets us know how it works?
Does DW provide the service of moving a a blog from Blogger to Wordpress? If yes, what is the charge for the service? Thank you.
i bookmarked this post for future reference. thanks.
@Carol
Sorry for late reply Carol.
Yes we do provide service and I will send you an email with proposal for the same right now.
@Rahul
Your welcome buddy!
Hi, first of all thank you for your exceptionally thorough post(s)!
I have one question, if running a WordPressMU install you are unable to change the permalinks on a blog-blog basis.
Currently my permalink structure is %year%/%monthum%/%day%/%post-title% which doesn’t match up with the blogger permalinks.
Any ideas, or should the code you enter above sort this?
One again, many thanks!
@Sam
You can choose different permalink structure for every blog in Wordpress MU.
Just go to “Settings >> Permalink”, like you do it no normal wordpress blog.
It won’t affect permalink structure of other blogs
Thank you for writing this wonderful tutorial, but I’m having difficulty with step 3. After I clicked on GRANT ACCESS to my blogger account this is what shows up:
Could not connect to https://www.google.com
There was a problem opening a secure connection to Google. This is what went wrong:
Unable to find the socket transport “ssl” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP? (17146051)
Thank you for creating with WordPress. | Documentation | Feedback
Version 2.7.1
I would greatly appreciate your help on this. Thank you!
@Michelle
You need to enable SSL support in PHP.
Try this for help.
Works like a charm, only problem is that the ‘link fields’ option in Blogger wont migrate to Wordpress, and with +500 posts, doing it all manually isn’t a path I want to go down… any advice?
Thanks so much for this! I migrated my website (www.dabbled.org) to wordpress and this was a lifesaver!
one thing you might want to mention. if you use lighttpd as your local webserver, pretty permalinks don’t work. So you may want to recommend the apache option.
Also, I have no idea if you could help with this, but I’m trying to figure out how to get my blogger Followers to receive my feed again. I use feedburner, and it’s always been set up that way in Blogger, so my normal feeds are fine. But the one the blogger Followers get doesn’t seem to be the same one. any ideas?
I also moved my blog to custom domain.. will you tell me something abt its effect on my pagerank?
Thanks for very useful article. I recently moved my blog from blogger to wordpress with custom domain option. i have feedburner account with sarkarinaukri.net but now plz tell how i moved the feedburner to new hosted blog although domain is same. But only hosting is change.
thanks
@Danny
Are you pointing to “Use this to make your title link to a website” field?
I never used it. I guess there is no point in making your post title link to other website. I never understood why Blogger had that option in the first place!
@Dot
About lighttpd… I am aware than permalinks won’t work with it but it is rarely used.
I personally will never recommend lighttpd as permalinks is essential feature for nice Google ranking!
About your feedburner feed, I guess you better log into feedburner and change your feed source from there (feedburner panel).
@Furobiker
If you were using custom domain on Blogger then it won’t affect your pagerank as long as you follow all steps in above article correctly.
@pankaj
Try logging into feedburner – http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/
You should be able to see your feed there.
Then click on your feed detail and change source to wordpress blogs’ feed URL.
Please update if above steps works for you. Many other guys are concerned with similar problem.
After seeing CRAP and meaningless tutorials on many sites I must say that this tutorial is the BEST! Thanks a lot rahul for this tutorial
The efforts put are really worthy to get back the SEO 
Nice tutorial Rahul. This is the best move. From Blogger to Wordpress with no pain.
Hey Rahul!
I need your help ASAP.
I did everything as per your tutorial. But now I am encountering a strange problem. My URL without “www” works fine but the one with “www” as in the blogger blogs shows up as a 404 error. I think I am trapped! Please help ASAP. I will loose a lot of traffic man!
Hi Rahul,
I finally did the change and it has worked out almost perfect
The only thing that has not been imported is the links on the names of people that left comments in the blog. Is there a way to get them back?
Thanks a lot!
FYI: It took me a month and a half to have my google pagerank back
How do you handle archives from blogger? http://stocksandblogs.com/2007_10_01_archive.html needs to point to http://stocksandblogs.com/2007/10
Thanks for a great post!
Hi again,
Another thing I get is some faulty redirections, i.e.:
http://comerhablaramar.blogspot.com/2008/09/delicias-en-la-webera.html
gets redirected to:
http://localhost/blogbruselas/2008/09/delicias-en-la-webera.html
I wonder why this localhost is there. Any ideas?
Is there anyway of finding all the links that don’t get correctly forwarded?
Thanks!
PD: I after 3 months I still have a lot of pages indexed in my old domain when running a google search for site:comerhablaramar.blogspot.com
I have installed the Google Analytics Dashboard plugin and when looking at the posts, I see that a lot of them display no statistics. Could this mean that their URL has not been properly formated and thus they are considered as new posts with no visits?
The prior example is suddenly working, but plenty of other links dont. If you run a search in Google for site:comerhablaramar.blogspot.com (the old site) and click on the links they get redirected to localhost and thus return a 404 page not found error.
Can anybody help me?
Is there a way to find those localhost refferences in the database and change them for the appropriate http://www.blogbruselas.com?
Thanks!
Hi Rahul!
Great tutorial. I wish I found it earlier in the process, but I’ve been able to complete all steps of moving from a custom-hosted Blogger domain to self-hosted Wordpress, except for one thing: Getting the old permalinks to work.
Because of a crappy bug I ran into (using the standard Blogger>WP importer was stripping all angle brackets), I had to do the import at Wordpress.com and then export as an WXR and import at the self-hosted Wordpress. The problem here is that is doesn’t look like Blogger permalinks were maintained. Which led me to this web page, and fix.php. I tried uploading and hitting the script, but it appears to have no effect. I looked at the script, and saw this line:
WHERE meta_key = ‘blogger_permalink’
I wonder, perhaps that meta_key field was lost in the double import process? Any idea how to change the permalinks in my self-hosted WP so that:
http://www.sfhomeblog.com/wordpress/2009/07/manic-episode-triggers-2600-fine-from-homeowners-association.html
becomes:
http://www.sfhomeblog.com/wordpress/2009/07/manic-episode-triggers-2600-fine-from.html
I think that would solve my problems!
Ha, sorry for the double post! I think I answered my own question — I should have tested before I posted.
Knowing a little MySQL, I just dropped the WHERE parameter from the query you wrote, so the select was run on all fields, with no where limitation.
Looks like that did the trick! The new WP permalinks match my old Blogger permalinks perfectly. Thanks for your help, you saved me hours of head-scratching! Feel free to post these comments for others to read.
Thanks for the tip about changing the permalink. I really don’t have a lot of traffic yet and plan to make changes. In the mean time it is really nice to keep the links I do have working. I was on blogger free and moved in an afternoon to a hosted wordpress with no prep. I have a terrible template but at least all the content is up.
Many thanks for the great tutorial, I’m migrating right now.
One thing you might add is that Blogger labels are converted into Wordpress categories; since having four thousands categories makes very long pages with themes that list all of them, I’ve converted most of them into tags with the apposite gadget found under Tools/Import.
hello, i changed my blogger with domain (yogaforweightloss.net) to self host wordpress and now my domain is not in google what to do to get in back Nd i have all new posts in self host wordpress except 1 post which is new but title is same as in blogger.
In my google webmaster dashboard it is showing google has accessed your homepages successfully and pages indexed in google and i used xml sitemep and it is showing right sign in google webmaster
but from long time my website is not in google.com search
and i lost ranking in bing.com, yahoo.com, give me some suggestions.
Solved the http://localhost/blogbruselas problem by:
1 Backing up (exporting) the database
2 Making a copy of the exported database just in case anything went wrong be able to restore the original and not waste my blog.
3 Doing a search and replace to change http://localhost/blogbruselas for http://www.blogbruselas.com
4 Restoring the modified database.
And it works!
Now I have found another problem: as I write the blog in Spanish, google used to eliminate the letters with accents and the plugin does include them wihtout the accent. The next step is to do locate those addresses and do a 301 permanent reroute.
The biggest problem I have now is that the links to the profiles of the people that left comments in the original blog are gonne. I don’t want to be a leach. Does anyone know how to solve this?
Another thing I noticed but I have not been able to understand why or how it happened is that some posts have been moved to a different date, but very few. This is a minor issue.
Anyway, the change has been a success with an inmediate increase in traffic and a lot of fun playing around with the plugins and themes. There is a lot of learning ahead!
Thanks for publishing the guide
Hi Rahul,
How to change all categories which was at Blogger and now as Tags at Wordpress.
Just let me update.
Jaydip
I can’t imagine I’m here on this site. Learning how to start the rules of bloggers to be exactly one of them someday.On this tutorial I must read more and understand the moving of bloggers to wordpress and analyze every information to be more accurately to begin with. Its almost 3 o’clock in the morning I must first sleep. I will continue tomorrow to read all the points what Rahul stated here on this site. Thanks Rahul. See you tomorrow I will start to picking up all your ideas and points from you to apply my first blog.
This is something really impressive i also want to migrate one of blogger blog to wordpress this service really made it easy for me thanks for sharing valuable information.
@Swashata & xavierlee
Thanks.
@Rohit
Sorry buddy couldn’t check this post for long time.
Hope your problem has been solved by now.
@Faisal Laljee
Its not handled yet. But will be handled via our wordpress plugin in next version.
@Evan
Glad to know that your problem has been solved.
By the way some more blogger experienced same problem and reason turn out to be their server-side setting.
Thanks for your inputs and workaround.
@Jojo
Glad to know your content is up. Rest can be improved upon with time.
Enjoy wordpress!
@Dek
Sorry to say but I could not get your point.
Please explain in details. We will surely find some workaround.
@Abhishek
Did you follow this tutorial before shifting?
@Ramon
I am really sorry for delay in answering your comments. Glad to see that you have figured answers to most of your problem yourself.
If there are any open issues, please let me know for you.
@jaydip
I need to check this in more details.
If I find any workaround, I will surely update you.
@Estrella
Best of luck for wordpress migration.
If you need any help, please let me know.
@Imran
Your welcome buddy.
Hi i would like to migrate from blogger to wordpress. Can you help me.
I’m stuck on Step 5.. I use bluehost to host my WP blog, where do I put this code?
Gr8 post … I followed the steps , but i get some strange errors while changing the permalinks,
like
”
Warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘Europe/Helsinki’ for ‘EEST/3.0/DST’ instead in /path/to/my/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 35
Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘Europe/Helsinki’ for ‘EEST/3.0/DST’ instead in /path/to/my/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 43
Warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘Europe/Helsinki’ for ‘EEST/3.0/DST’ instead in /path/to/my/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 35
Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘Europe/Helsinki’ for ‘EEST/3.0/DST’ instead in /path/to/my/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 43 ”
what should i have to do now?
Can i do the migration skipping the localhost installation step?
pls help me….
Hi,
I cleared the error above but i got into another trouble.I followed all of the steps and i moved to wordpress too .
i can see all of my posts in the home page of my blog but
when i click on it i get a 404 error … pls help me with this my blog is in grave danger now…. please…
Trying to understand step 0 and the ‘intermediate’ concept. Do I need to wait for a couple of months after registering mydomain.com on Blogger? Wait until site:oldsite.blogspot.com shows no result and site:mydomain.com shows all my posts, and then start with step 1?
thanks for sharing those information. nice post.
Im tryin to import my blogspot.com to my website (wordpress.com) but im stuck at step5..i think i did wat i had to do with the code/fix.php file but then i got this error:
“Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘wp-load.php’ (include_path=’.:’) in /var/www/vhosts/test.kodikas.gr/httpdocs/wp/wp-content/uploads/fix.php on line 2″
wat am i doing wrong?
thanks alot in advance! was the only helpful article i could find!
Great script. Your fix.php file was EXACTLY what I was looking for during my migration from Blogger to Wordpress.
pls help
I am having problem on step 5, i don’t know where to save the code. What do you mean when you say wordpress folder?
Exactly what I needed to know to transfer my blogger blog because of more than one reason. There is a lot of reading to be done so I have bookmarked this page.
Very helpful. Thanks
@kashif
Do let us know if you have any problem while migration.
FYI we also provide professional Migration services
Thanks For this help ful Tips Rahul, but i am facing severe problem with this sites can you please help me from the SEO perspect please with this site http://www.greenvanlines.com. I am working everyday For this site Article,Dir,Social Bookmarking, Social Networking but except those things the analytics result of the Dashboard not going Up dera help me please ASAP.