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If you are an avid blogger, most likely you started off on an amateur basis with free services like Blogger and over time acquired a large number of following and have decided that maybe it’s time for you strike off into your own domain and get www.MYSITE.com instead of MYSITE.blogspot.com. Well, that may be a wonderful dream and all, but consider some glaring problems with doing the switch if you didn’t plan ahead.

First off, your old blog will probably be abandoned. At most, you may insert a new link to point visitors to your new blog. But all the search engines that have linked to your old blogs will continue to link to them and not to your updated blog, and that may be a problem because you will need to rebuild all your ‘reputation’ all over again. In particular, all those Google-generated visitor traffic won’t be able to reach your new blog, which means you’re basically starting over from scratch all over again. AdSense revenue will tank as a result.

Blogspot

Secondly, your RSS feed will die, and readers who have been following your feed will most probably just delete the non-responsive feed and move on. Don’t underestimate the amount of people who use RSS as a way to keep track of their favorite web spaces.

However, fear not as there is a way for your to migrate from Blogger to your own self-hosted WordPress server in 6 simple steps that avoid all the pitfalls described earlier. Digital Inspiration‘s Amit Agarwal compiled these useful step-by-step instructions:

Step 1: In case you haven’t done this already – register a new web domain, buy server space from some web hosting company that offers PHP/MySQL hosting and and install WordPress software on your new domain.

Step 2: Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard > Tools > Import and select the Blogger option. Authorize WordPress to access your Google Account and within minutes, all your old blog posts and comments will be available on the new WordPress site.

Step 3: Copy this file into your WordPress themes directory. This is what you should copy over: blogger.php.txt

Step 4. Open your WordPress Dashboard and go to Pages -> Add New Page. Keep the title and URL of that page as blogger and select “blogger” from the Template drop-down. Save. There’s no need to add any content to this page.

Step 5. Open the template generator, type the full address of your new WordPress blog (including http:// and the trailing slash) and this tool will create a new classic template for your blogspot blog that will look something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="<$BlogLanguageDirection$>">
<head>
<title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>
<script type="text/javascript">
<MainOrArchivePage>window.location.href='xxx'</MainOrArchivePage>
<Blogger><ItemPage>window.location.href='xxxblogger/?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>'</ItemPage></Blogger>
</script></head><body>
<div style="border:#ccc 1px solid; background:#eee; padding:20px; margin:80px;">
<p>This page has moved to a new address.</p>
<h1>
<MainOrArchivePage><a href="xxx"><$BlogTitle$></a></MainOrArchivePage>
<Blogger>
<ItemPage><a href="xxxblogger/?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><$BlogItemTitle$></a></ItemPage>
</Blogger>
</h1>
</div>
</body></html>
<!-- replace xxx with your WordPress site URL --->

Step 6. Open your Blogger Dashboard -> Layout -> Edit HTML and choose “Revert to Classic Blog”. Copy-paste the template generated in Step 5 in the “Edit Template” area and click “Save Template Changes”.

Your are done. Open any page on your old Blogger blog and it should redirect you to the corresponding WordPress page. On the WordPress side, since we are using a permanent 301 redirect with the redirection URLs, all the Google Juice will probably pass to your new WordPress pages with time.

Update your RSS Feed: When you move from Blogger to WordPress, the address of your RSS feed will change as well. Go to Blogger -> Settings -> Site Feed, type the address of your new WordPress RSS feed here and Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. will automatically move to your new feed.

There you go, a complete and pain-free (for the most part) process that allows you to continue blogging without diminishing the user traffic that you have so painstakingly built over the years. Happy blogging!

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