What I Wish I Knew When I Migrated To Wordpress From Blogger
Planning to move to wordpress from Google blogger? Excellent! You have already taken the first move to be a successful blogger. But one thing you need to note down and understand is: “Wordpress isn’t easy INITIALLY“. And I am doing justice to both the platforms if I emphasis the word initially. Google owned platform blogger is very easy to use and any new user can start a blog within few minutes. But in case of self hosted wordpress blogs, you need a startup guide.
People do say wordpress is cake walk but a new user can easily deviate from his path and end up regretting his idea of migrating to wordpress. After I successfully migrated to wordpress from blogger and as my posting schedule again took pace than I looked back and what I saw was a series of steps which every new user must know before migrating to wordpress.
So here are the very basic but very necessary steps which must be followed while moving to wordpress.
Choosing The Appropriate Domain:
Now understand one thing. You are going to launch your blog on your own domain. You will confidently be telling your friends about your xyz.com domain. So make it attractive and not too lengthy. Remember that this might very well be the last chance to choose a proper domain for your dream blog. (read my experiences of choosing a unique and attractive domain on my about page)
Choose The Appropriate Hosting Service:
Once again a very important step as who knows when you hit the digg.com’s homepage and see a sudden tsunami of readers. You wont want your website to go down in that period. This is when a good hosting service company comes into play. There are many points to be considered while choosing the best hosting service but that is another story and you can wait for my under construction post about hosting services. Until then do some Googling.
Install Wordpress In Your Space Under Your Domain:
Now this is truly a child’s play as most of the services offer one-click wordpress install but if unfortunately your blog hosting provider isn’t that generous than refer to the wordpress installing guide.
Transferring Your Blogger Posts To Wordpress:
It might seem to be a daunting task as by now you might have accumulated tons of good posts and you wont like to loose them. Don’t worry, you wont loose them!
Log-in to your wordpress account (you should have received the log-in details while installation) and follow this path from the main menu (as shown in the image below) Manage > Import > Blogger.
You will be asked to authorize your blogger account and than your wordpress posts will be imported to your new domain. The process might take time if you have large number of posts (and comments) to be imported.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Wordpress imports your blog posts from your RSS feeds so it will import the signatures which you have in your feeds. Better remove the signature before importing the posts.
Choose The Appropriate Template:
There are tons of templates available around the Internet. Just take few pains and do some searching. Else buy unique templates here. Work on the look of the template and work on it very hard as in todays world of Internet the cover of the book matters!
Monetize The Categories:
Better do this work now itself. I am sure that your categories arn’t that well organized and there are multiple categories with same meaning. Work on this now and you will save a lot of time in future.
Improve The Permalink Structure:
The default permalink (slug in wordpress) as shown in the image above includes some numbers and is totally weird. To make your permalinks search engine friendly you must use the second option (Date and name based permalink) else a custom permalink structure.
You can optimize the Date and Name based permalink to include the category name in the custom permalinks structure. It gives a good explanatory look to your permalink and makes it search engine friendly.
Ping Google About Your Migration:
Its time to inform Google that you left Google blogger and migrated your blog to wordpress so that your new blog URL is included in the search items. Don’t be worried, Google wont penalize you for leaving blogger and shifting to wordpress. They are that generous. Here are the steps to be followed:
- Submit your new domain in your Google Webmaster account and follow the verification steps.
- Use the online XML sitemap creator tool to create a XML sitemap for your blog and save the sitemap.xml file to your new hosts root directory (yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml).
- In the webmaster dashboard select the new domain and submit your sitemap URL there.
Check back after 4-5 days and you will find that Google has started to index your pages. Check for any broken links and do work on those links as broken links are not a healthy experience for the readers.
Now that your new blog is indexed please do delete your old blogger blog. Your own blogger blog might be listed as better search item than your new domain just because the older one has more number of back links and hence it must be deleted.
Earn Back All The Old Backlinks:
Write a generous email to all those people who had linked to your old blog requesting them to link to your new blog. It works!
Mirroring:
The same question again. What if you hit the digg homepage and somehow your blog goes down due to huge traffic. This is when the concept of mirrors seems to be useful. I read about this here and did find it interesting. So here is what you have to do:
Go to the Coral Content Distribution Network website and enter your URL in the form (under Using Coral) and click ‘Go’. This will open a new window and show you your mirrored page (this may take a minute). Coral works like a P2P network and as soon as your link is submitted on their website, it’s mirrored around the world across 260+ servers.
Huh! Did you finally launch your new blog in wordpress with ease? 
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