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Monday, July 1, 2013

How I Moved from WordPress.com to Blogspot.com

Now that you know Why I moved from WordPress.com to Blogspot.com, let me walk you through how I made the move. Here are the steps I took to both make the move and to forward my content from WordPress.com to Blogger:

How I moved from WordPress.com to Blogspot.com

  1. Set up Blogger Site

    Make sure your site is exactly how you want it before going live. You will want to do this first as this will generally take more time than exporting and importing your blog.

  2. Export your WordPress data and Import to Blogger

    David Haimes' article How to Migrate from WordPress to Blogger details the steps required to export your WordPress data, convert it to Blogger data and then import to Blogger. It worked very smoothly and I had no problems following his steps. It requires using the WordPress to Blogger App to convert the WordPress data to Blogger data.

    WordPress 2 Blogger App (Screenshot from http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/)

  3. Set up another site on a free self-hosted WordPress site

    For this step, I chose 3owl.com. It is a free hosting service that lets you set up the WordPress software in one click. Once you set up the WordPress software, import your wordpress.com data (not your blogger data that you made in step 2). Now you will have a duplicate site of your wordpress.com site at 3owl.com.

  4. Set up your self-hosted WordPress site to forward to Blogger

    Use to following code for each post and page on your self-hosted WordPress site in order to forward each post and page to blogger:


  5. Forward WordPress.com site to a self-hosted WordPress site which forwards to Blogger

    The reason why we set up a third site at 3owl.com is because WordPress.com will only forward to another wordpress site. It will not forward to blogger because the URL structure is different. You can pay $13 per year to forward your site to the 3owl.com site. This will automatically forward all of your posts and pages to yoursite.3owl.com. Using step 4 code, this will forward everyone to your blogger pages.

You might be wondering, why didn't I just host from the 3owl.com site? For one, I wasn't planning on getting a domain name (I still can't come up with a good name!), so the subdomain wasn't ideal. I am also worried about security and upkeep of a self-hosted site. I felt I am better capable of customizing a blogger blog myself versus possibly needing to hire a developer to help me with a WordPress blog. See Why I moved from WordPress.com to Blogspot.com for more reasons why I chose to host on blogger.

Things that worked well

  • Export/Import was smooth: Every post and page exported smoothly without a hitch. I used David's suggestion to post to draft. I then went through each page to ensure that everything transferred over smoothly.
  • Redirect works flawlessly: Viewers may see a glimpse of the 3owl.com site, so make sure you set it up with a theme. I chose to set it up to look very much like the new site. I also set up a static home page that redirects to the new homepage.
  • Blogger set up nicely: I decided to set up my blogger site to mimic my old wordpress.com site. I think it looks pretty good! I have so much more freedom to customize it the way I want it to look and add widgets and scripts.

Things that didn't work well

  • Comments didn't come over smoothly: Some of them are missing (I think because they were replies to replies to replies?) and the hierarchy and order is gone (replies are no longer grouped with the original comment). This sucks, but I figure I will have new posts and new comments to make up for this. A year from now this will be a distant concern.
  • Dates aren't correct: I noticed all my dates moved back a day. I didn't notice until I saw that my April Fools post was no longer in April, which messed up my redirect code.
  • No categories: Tags are equivalent to labels during the export/import process. Before exporting my WordPress site, I ended up deleting all of my tags and converting my categories to tags. This way when I exported my WordPress blog, my categories are transferred over as labels. After doing this, I moved the tags back to categories so that the WordPress.com blog keeps it's functionality. I don't think this is necessary, but if someone clicks a link that references a category (like for my Photog Show and Tell link party) it will transfer over to the 3owl.com site.
  • Picture formatting and captioning was messed up: Blogger doesn't use the same code as WordPress, so all my images with captions were messed up. None of the alignments were right either, so all my images had to be reformatted. This took time, as I had to click through each post and fix each picture.
  • No more Gigya code: Which is awesome! Yay! But it did mean that my YouTube, slide shows, rafflecopter and link party embeds are gone. I had to update them to proper code.
  • Permalinks don't come through in the import: This means bloggers auto Permalink kicks on. Bloggers auto permalink structure isn't great, so I had to reformat many of my Permalinks.

How do you keep your followers?

Double post to self-hosted WordPress site: I set up If This Than That to send a draft post from blogger to the self-hosted wordpress site. I can then add the meta code above and publish it. This sends the post to the old feed which includes the wordpress.com reader and the old bloglovin' feed. I don't plan on doing this forever, but its nice to help bring in the old traffic.


Don't know what If This Than That is? Check out my Review of IFTTT for more details.

You don't lose your Facebook, Google+, Pinterest or Twitter followers: I have more followers on each of these platforms than those following me via email, wordpress reader or bloglovin' combined.

Pinterest Referrals Will Decrease: That is the nature of redirects. This would be true if I switched to self-hosting though. The redirect flags your links as potential spam.

Can't lose your future followers: I am a small blog, so I can only go up from here. I am optimistic that I will soon catch back up and surpass my WordPress followers here on Blogger.

Is it worth it?

Yes! I am so much happier on blogger. I love have more control over my site and being able to add  widgets and scripts. I really look forward to continuing blogging into the next year.

Don't forget to check out part 1 and part 3 of this series:


Linking to: Give Me the Goods Monday | No Rules Weekend Party | Freedom Fridays | Pin Me | Fun in Functional | A Pinteresting Party | Mums Make Lists

14 comments:

  1. I plan on switching to a new URL eventually! Thanks for the great tips!

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  2. Thanks for the invite! I'm headed over there now to link up.

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  3. I had to click on this. You are the first person ever I've seen who prefers Blogger to WordPress. I've been a Blogger blogger for 7 years now and while I do miss out on some of the fancy plug-ins and stuff, Blogger seems so much simpler and less breakable than WP. Cheaper too because it's basically free, except for the little bit I pay to designers to set stuff up for me. It's nice to find another fan.

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  4. Did you have to pay an initial $13 for wordpress.com to import to wordpress.org, and then pay 3owl $13 also? I'm in the middle of this process right now, and this is the first information I could find on the subject. I'm so confused!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I did not pay wordpress or 3owl. It is actually a pretty simple process to export the blog and then import it. Here is a tutorial to export a wordpress blog: http://en.support.wordpress.com/export/. I hope this helps! Good luck!

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  5. i personally like WordPress, and i have also a site and using the WordPress hosting from Dollarwp. i like it only for its theme and its easy to use. thanks

    ReplyDelete
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