Step by Step Blogger to WordPress Migration Tutorial
Hi everyone. I’m going to show you a step by step Blogger to WordPress migration tutorial based on my experience so sit back, relax, make a cup of coffee or tea — whichever you prefer and enjoy!
Before I start, please read these articles below to know more about Blogger.com vs. Wordpress.com vs. Wordpress.org:
WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com
WordPress.org vs. Blogger.com
WordPress.com vs. Blogger.com
WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com vs. Blogger.com
Here’s a comparison table between 3 platforms
Or if you’re just too lazy to read:
Blogger.com: EVERYTHING IS FREE. You can buy domain from other provider such as Netkl. You can buy premade template. Limited features unless you know coding etc.
WordPress.com: EVERYTHING IS FREE, for now. But they will put ads on your site. You have to buy domain from WordPress.com itself. You have to buy storage if you exceed storage limit. You cannot buy WordPress premade themes from Etsy or other web developers, only from WordPress.com developers. Have to pay to edit theme/access CSS editor (means you can’t even change fonts unless you pay). Basically, you need to pay for everything else.
WordPress.org (self-hosted): EVERYTHING NEEDS MONEY means you have to pay for hosting. But worth it. You can do basically anything with a self-hosted WordPress.
Now that I’ve got that covered, I’m going to talk about hosting for WordPress.org. The most important things you need to pay attention to before buying hosting are disk storage and bandwidth limit. That’s it. It’s not that I don’t care about other features, it’s just I don’t understand them and so far I’m doing fine with not knowing. LOL.
Disk storage: It’s like your phone memory. It keeps every data, every picture, basically your whole entire site so it’s important to resize and optimise every single photo in your blog. Right now, my disk storage limit is only 500MB and I have used 210MB. I need to resize and optimise photos in my older posts (or even delete the posts altogether) to save even more space. I know I will have to upgrade my hosting probably in a year or two.
Bandwidth limit: Everytime someone visits your blog, it eats up your bandwidth limit. For example, you have 10GB bandwidth limit. Your page size is 1MB. So if two people visit one page of your blog, they eat up 2MB of your 10GB. 10,000MB (10GB) / 1MB (per visit) = 10,000 visits per month. Bandwidth will be reset every month. Right now, my bandwidth limit is 10GB and my homepage size is 1.5MB so I can get around 6,500 – 7000 visits every month. If my blog grows, I will have to upgrade my hosting. But of course, not every page in my blog is 1.5MB so I can probably save up a lot on my bandwidth. Plus, there’s so many plugins that will help to optimise your blog so don’t worry!
BEFORE MIGRATING
1. Make a blog post telling your followers that you’re migrating to WordPress and to refollow your blog on Blogger. And to my visitors from Blogger, you can follow WordPress blog on Blogger so please refollow me there or on Bloglovin’.
2. You can also do this after you migrated to WordPress but make sure that all of your photos are optimised, probably around 50kb-150kb in size for each photo to save space on your disk storage.
3. If you’re not sure you can do it yourself, you can hire a web developer or your web host to migrate it for you but with a cost.
4. If you’re planning to do it yourself, pick a day when you’re not in a shitty mood or on your period ’cause I did it myself on my first day of period with menstrual pain and bad migraine and I felt awful the whole day but I did it nonetheless.
5. Make a cup of coffee!
6. Say your prayers and hope to God that you don’t f*cked up.
7. My tutorial is following Kotryna’s manual so you can follow hers too.
STEP ONE: Buy hosting + install WordPress
I bought my hosting from Netkl.com for MYR 60 per year. I chose the cheapest one which is mySilver X. It comes with 500MB disk storage + 10GB bandwidth + free domain + 3 emails. I strongly suggest you to choose the cheapest one first because you ain’t gonna get that 1000 pageviews a day like you did on Blogger in the early stage after migration. Sobs.
Netkl.com is a Malaysia-based web host so you can converse in Malay with them, no problem. With other Malaysian web host companies, they offer a much cheaper hosting than Netkl BUT you have to pay MYR 45 per year for domain separately. For example, company A package offers MYR 30 hosting (same disk storage/bandwidth with what Netkl offers) but you have to pay for domain too. So you’ll end up paying MYR 30 (hosting) + MYR 45 (domain) = MYR 75 when Netkl only charge you MYR 60 for both domain and hosting. Get it?
I purchased my domain on Netkl.com too so I had them transfer my domain to the hosting. If you have different web host for domain and hosting, then it’s going to be a bit of a problem. You can get your domain transferred to other web host but that usually takes around 1 to 2 business days. Yikes. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
So choose a hosting, pick a domain name if you don’t have one, and checkout.
They will email you with your cPanel and FTP username and password.
Since my domain is already on Netkl, they kindheartedly change my nameservers for me. Don’t ask me what is that. Blogger and WordPress have different nameservers. Don’t worry — if it’s your first time buying domain, they will set up everything (DNS, nameservers etc) for you.
Go to your domain cPanel, for example www.erinazmir.com/cpanel and sign in using the username and password they provided in the email.
Install WordPress on your domain with this video tutorial. Make sure to follow every single thing, okay? It’s very simple. When it says ‘Leave it as it is’, then don’t edit anything at all.
If WordPress is installed successfully, they will give you a link to your WordPress dashboard which is www.erinazmir.com/wp-admin/
I had to wait an hour before my blog is ready because they reconfigured my nameservers from Blogger to self-hosted. You can always refresh your domain to see if it’s ready or not.
Sign in using the username and password you entered during one of the steps in video tutorial above, NOT your cpanel username and password.
And voila! You’re basically done. If you visit your domain, it will already be a WordPress blog.
Step two: Export your content on Blogger
If you wanna start fresh then skip this step.
Blogger dashboard > Settings > Other > Back Up Content > ‘Save to your computer’
It will be downloaded in .xml file. This contains all of your posts and comments.
Step three: Import your posts to WordPress
1. Log in to your WordPress blog. www.domainhere.com/wp-admin/
2. On the left side, go to Tools > Import and choose Blogger.
3. A new window will pop up asking you to install a Blogger to WordPress Importer, click Install.
4. Once installed, click on ‘Activate the Plugin & Run the Importer‘.
5. It will ask you to upload your .xml file containing your posts and comments that you’ve downloaded previously so go ahead and upload it.
6. You’ll be asked if you want to assign your blog posts to existing author or create a new one. I just chose existing author but it’s up to you tho.
If your images don’t transfer well, go to Plugins > Add New > search Import External Images > Install Now > Activate
After activating, on your left side, go to Media > Import Images > Import Images Now
Step four: Fix your permalinks
As you all know, Blogger and WordPress have different permalinks. Blogger has a fixed permalink that looks like this:
www.erinazmir.com/year/month/post-title-here.html
While on WordPress, you have a various type of permalink to choose from. You can make your WordPress permalink to look like Blogger but since I hated Blogger permalink (.html irks me so much!), I went with this:
www.erinazmir.com/year/month/post-title-here/
Go to Settings >Permalinks and choose Month and name. I like Post name (www.erinazmir.com/post-title-here/) too but it’s hard to know when the post was published as the date and month are not stated.
Step five: Redirection (Blogger to WordPress)
This part is a bit tricky to do. Go to Plugins > Add New > search Blogger to WordPress > Activate the one by rtCamp > Install Now > Activate
Follow this tutorial starting from Step 2. Step 1 only explains how to install and activate the plugin.
Step six: RSS redirection (feedburner)
You only have to do this if you have email subscribers on FeedBurner (most of us don’t).
Blogger dashboard > Settings > Other > Post Feed Redirect URL > Add your link https://www.yourdomainname.com/feed/
Step seven: Bloglovin’
You need to contact Bloglovin’ and ask them to update your url. Click here.
Step eight: Theme
Technical things aside, now onto the fun stuff which is WordPress themes! Aaaaah! Yes, we called it a theme not template. WordPress theme is so expensive and that’s why I bought mine during Black Friday sale.
It’s so hard to find inexpensive but cute WordPress themes because the cute ones are always USD 40 and above. Our currency really sucks right now so that’s not helping at all.
But I do have a few recommendation under MYR 200:
BellaCreativeShop
BloomBlogShop
LightMorangoShop
CityHouseDesign
MaiLoveParis
Tinselpop
MYR 200 above:
KotrynaBassDesign
Pipdig.co
MairaGall
BluChic
StationSeven
Restored316Design
Side note: If the theme you wanna buy is a Genesis child theme or it mentions something about Genesis, make sure that Genesis framework is included in the theme file because Genesis framework costs about USD 60 if bought separately. Ain’t nobody got money for that.
I got my design from KotrynaBassDesign. She provides free installation but I did it myself (Appearance > Theme > Add New > Upload New). However, I did encounter a few technical problems so she solved it for me. I thank her for her patience with me for the past 3 days ahaha.
Plugins
Here’s a list of plugins I’m currently using for my blog not including the ones I mentioned above:
Akismet: to moderate spam comments
Disqus Comment System: you all probably know what Disqus is — so easy to reply and keep track of your comments
Generate Post Thumbnails: if your post photos don’t show on your blog homepage, you probably don’t have Featured Image set so use this plugin
Jetpack by WordPress.com: I freaking love this. Has your blog stats and basically secures your blog from malicious attacks. To use features that are only available on WordPress.com
Official StatCounter Plugin: easier to understand than Google Analytics. Been using this for years!
TinyMCE Advanced: for a more advanced post editor. Have yet to explore what it can do but I can add table on my posts now.
W3 Total Cache: improve your site speed by using cache. I love this.
Yoast SEO: You know how on Blogger so many people are obsessed with SEO and so many bloggers did a tutorial on how to check your SEO with https://chkme.com and yay if you got 100% SEO? I call BS on that one. This plugin is the mother of SEO, not even kidding you. While you’re typing your post, it will tell you what you have to fix and give you a ‘red light’ if your post doesn’t comply with their SEO rules. Yes, a plugin is giving me a friggin’ red light ’cause my SEO is bad.
Cost breakdown
Hosting (Netkl.com) = MYR 60 (yearly payment)
Theme (KotrynaBassDesign Black Friday 50% off) = MYR 113 (one-time payment)
Total paid = MYR 173 (MYR 286 without Black Friday sale)
My blog is all set up now except for posts that I still need to reformat and resize/optimise images. Other than that, cheers to my 2017 look!
Now, do I think migrating from Blogger to WordPress is worth it?
HECK YES. IT’S SO WORTH IT. I’M SO HAPPY I TOOK THE PLUNGE!
However, I do not recommend going self-hosted if you don’t take blogging seriously or if you only update your blog once in a blue moon or you just want an easy blogging platform that can offer you basic features you need to start a blog or you don’t wanna spend money on your blog (buying hosting + upgrade, a theme, and pay for technical support if needed). It’s that simple. Don’t go self-hosted just because you see other bloggers are doing it.
Going self-hosted is a lot of work, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It took me about 4 days to get my blog ready and along the way I encountered a few technical problems with my blog such as search result not showing, posts not showing when you click on monthly archive link, and a few other bits and bobs.
I’d be damned if it wasn’t for Kotryna who sorted out my blog for me so always read reviews before buying a theme from a developer. Make sure your theme developer provides support.
Would I consider going back to Blogger? I don’t know about the future but for now, probably not. LOL. I love it here. I don’t have to play with coding just to get a multi-level drop-down menu on navigation bar (check out my navigation bar for demo, I love it!).
I really, really hope this post helps you tremendously ’cause it took a lot of hours to finish this post. Phew. Let me know if you’re thinking of migrating so we can chit chat about it!
