Migrating Blogger blogs to WordPress, and setting up 301 redirects to ensure no links are broken

Created September 7, 2007 by
  1. Ok, basically if your blog is a new Blogger blog (after it was acquited by Google and Google usernames introduced) first step is to be sure have WordPress 2.2.

If you have an old version of WP, you can always upgrade:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended

WordPress 2.1 allows you to upgrade from Old Blogger blogs, but not New ones.

  1. If your Blogger blog is hosted via FTP, go into the settings of the blogger blog and turn it into a blogspot blog (this change is reversible if anything goes wrong). Your blogger blog url will now be at (some name you choose).blogspot.com
  2. Go to your blog admin on your WP blog. Go to Manage -> Import and select the ‘New Blogger’ option. You will be asked for your blogspot url, blogger username and password. And hey presto, the job is done! (You might want to verify that before we go on)

Some recent users may have trouble signing into their Google account from WordPress due to the fact that Blogger changed their hostname API:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/131952?replies=2

As you can see here, you just need to make a simple change in wp-admin/import/blogger.php file, changing www2.blogger.com in line 84 to www.blogger.com. This will be automatically fixed in WordPress 2.3.

  1. Ok, here is the time consuming job, setting up redirects from the old posts to the new, so that if someone clicks on a link to the old address they are automatically forwarded. Make sure you first are happy with the permalink structure on your WP blog (Go to Options -> Permalinks to change this)

Now open up some text editor to write the redirects. Suppose your old blogger blog was at

http://www.mysite.com/{old address}

and your new WP address is at

http://www.mysite.com/{new address}

basically all you do is type

redirect 301 /{old address} http://www.mysite.com/{new address}

301 is basically a code that tells Google that the item has permanently moved to the new address and you aren’t trying to pull any funny stuff on them. For each entry, type in the proper 301 redirect on a separate line. You can still get the old url address by looking at the blogspot blog.

You need to type in the full URL of the new address. Why? Basically, it allows you to redirect your posts to entries on a completely different site if you so choose!

Now you need to use an FTP client to go into the filesystem of where you host your blog. At root there should be a file called .htaccess; if not, create one (all files with . in front are system files and might be hidden unless you tell your FTP client to show hidden files). Then just copy and paste your redirects into this file, save, and try it out by typing in an old blogger address

  1. I’ve heard (although i don’t know the logic behind it) that its good to keep the FTP site going for a couple of days. So go to your Blogger blog and move it back to ftp, and then delete it after a few days.

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