Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Importing and Fixing Your Blogger Articles

November 27, 2012 by Daniel Sharkov|

A week ago I published the first of three posts, dedicated entirely to moving from Blogger to WordPress.

Before scrolling down, you might want to take a look at the previous article of the series: “ Moving From Blogger to WordPress: Has the Time Finally Come?” Now that you have hopefully found out whether Blogger is good enough for you or you need WordPress, it is time to move on!

Today we are taking a look at the practical part i.e. how to actually transfer all of your blog posts into your shiny new WordPress installation and how to get rid of the problems that come with this.

How do You Import Your
Blogger Blog Posts?

Fortunately no – you don’t have to open up each and every post and copy/paste its content into WordPress. Importing your posts is actually the easy bit ( although most of the explanations I found on the internet were making it look quite difficult ).

Here are the steps you have to follow to migrate your posts to WordPress:

First you need to install the “ Blogger Importer” plug-in ( download link) If you’ve bought a custom domain, you should remove it from your Blogger account Then you need to upload this PHP fileto your WordPress’ theme directory ( wp-content/themes/YOUR THEME NAME/ ) After that you need to revert your Blogger blog to the classic template Then scroll down to “Edit Template HTML” and paste that HTML code Now you have to find and replace all “ http://www.reviewzntips.com ” instances with the URL of your new WordPress blog

Alternatively here is video tutorial to show you how to that:

Credit for the PHP and the HTML files and the video goes to Labnol

What Permalink Structure
Should You Choose?

Now that we are finished with importing the blog posts, we need to take care of another important aspect. That is namely our blog’s link structure. You probably know what that structure in Blogger-powered blogs is but just in case:

http://BLOG NAME.blogspot.com/YEAR/MONTH/BLOG POST.html

http://reviewzntips.blogspot.com/2012/11/online-business-problems.html

As you can see, the date of the post stands before the actual permalink ( i.e. online-business-problems ). This might not look bad for the visitor, but it isn’t ideal when it comes to search engines.

In Google’s eyes the more emphasize you’d like to put on a keyword, the closer that keyword should be to the beginning of the article, the headline or the URL.

That’s not what we have in the above example. What Google sees as more important in that Blogspot URL is the date of the post, which is obviously not what we need.

To fix this, you need to open up your WordPress dashboard
, scroll down to “Settings” –> “Permalinks”, choose “Custom Structure” and put /%postname%/ in the field.

How to Fix the Broken Links?

One very annoying problem that occurs after importing your blog posts is that not one of your internal links will work.

Fortunately (once again!), there is a pretty neat plug-in that will do most of the hard work for you. The tool is Broken Link Checker( download link). Whenever you sign in to your dashboard the plugin starts searching for broken links. Once the search is finished, you can simply open the list of dead links and start editing. The good thing is you don’t have to edit each instance of the same link, since the changes apply to all identical URLs.

QUICK NOTE: In order to find as much links as possible, once you install the plug-in, go to Settings –> Link Checker –> Advanced and set the timeout (the first option) to 4 seconds.

How and Why You Should
Generate Post Thumbnails

Post thumbnails are used by all those plug-ins, dedicated to showing a list of related, recent, popular, etc. kind of articles either in your sidebar or under your blog posts.

Having one ( I’d recommend all three ) of those plug-ins is a great way to keep visitors just a little longer on your site. Allowing thumbnails to be shown generally improves click-through rates, since images are a far better way to catch one’s attention than simply using plain text ( see four other reasons why blog post images are important: “ 4 Reasons to Add Images to Every Post You Publish“ ).

The problem with moving from Blogger to WordPress is that although your images will still be there, no thumbnails will be assigned to them hence the widgets won’t be able to display them.

Fixing the problem however is quite an easy task! The only tool you need is Auto Post Thumbnails( download link). Once you install it, you simply go to
your WordPress dashboard –> Settings –> Auto Post Thumbnails –> Generate Thumbnails . The rest of the process is entirely automated.

From that Point On…

Now that you followed the above steps, you are pretty much done. What you need now are some great plugins to lighten up your WordPress blog! That is exactly what I am going to share with you in the third part of my “Moving from Blogger to WordPress” series!
Stay tuned!

Your Thoughts

Did you have problems when moving from Blogger to WordPress? Did you have any problems with the steps I overviewed in the above paragraphs? Do let me know your thoughts guys!

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