A complete guide to moving your Google Blogger account to a Blue Globe blog account running WordPress

This guide is available in full in pdf format here.

1 – First Things First

One of the main advantages of moving from Blogger to your own installation of WordPress is that you can say goodbye to the .blogspot.com extension and choose your own domain name. So the first thing you need to do is decide on the domain name for your blog, and check that it is available.

You can do this using our Domain Name checker – which will also tell you the prices for each domain and how many years it will be before that domain needs renewing. Simply visit our homepage to use the Domain Name checker.

Once you are happy that your domain name is available then you need to choose a hosting package that suits your needs. You can install WordPress with one click on the majority of our packages, but if you simply want to host one blog then our Blog Hosting packages are going to be the ones to browse. With our blog hosting packages you only have the option to install blogs and only have 1 mySQL database, meaning that you can only install one blog at a time (unless you pay for additional mySQL Databases). The upshot of this is that you’re not paying for untold amounts of cgi scripts that you’ll never use, instead Blue Globe gives you extra bandwidth and storage space versus our traditional web hosting packages – and when it comes to blogging storage space and bandwidth are all you need to worry about.

So, by this point you should have chosen a domain name, a blog hosting package with Blue Globe and ordered it through our system. You’ll then have to wait for up to 48 hours (although it is normally much quicker) for your web domain to be properly active and then you can install WordPress on your domain.

2 – Installing WordPress

To install WordPress please read our guide here.

3 – Setting Up WordPress

You’ll now be advised to change your password – which you really should do – to something you have a chance of remembering. If you ever forget your login / password in future then WordPress can re-send the relevant information to your email address, so don’t fret too much.

You should then check that it actually works, so open up your website in a separate browser tab to make sure you can see your blog.

Read our guide on Configuring WordPress to set up the basics before moving onto step 4 – which will configure WordPress ready to import your Blogger data.

4 – Moving from Google Blogger

Transfer your feed
You don’t have to lose any subscribers when you move. Instead, open a Feedburner account and then redirect your Blogger account to aim at it. To set up a feedburner account and aim Blogger and your new WordPress blog at it: follow this guide.

Prepare your WordPress blog for Blogger post structure

Blogger has a particular way of structuring the links of blog posts. In order for the content / links you’re bringing in from Blogger to work as well as possible we need to make WordPress create its links in the same way.

In the backend of WordPress click on the expand button for the ‘settings’ menu.
You’ll now see a variety of options, click on ‘Permalinks’.

You’ll now be given examples of how basic permalinks can be structured. Select ‘Custom Structure’ and input the following: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

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The easy bit of transferring the posts / comments

In WordPress backend, expand the ‘Tools’ menu and click on ‘Import’.

Then select ‘Blogger’ from the list of websites / blogs that you can import information from. Then click on ‘Authorize’ which will ask Google Blogger to allow you to import information from it – you may need to login to your Google Blogger account if you are not already. Once you are logged in you will be asked by Google Blogger to either ‘Grant’ or ‘Deny’ access to your Blogger account for your new domain. If you click ‘Grant’ then you’ll be taken back to WordPress where you will see details about what it is about to import from Blogger. Here you will see my newly created Blogger account, which has only 3 posts and no comments, obviously your transfer will look a look more impressive than this!

Once you are satisfied, hit the ‘magic button’: ‘Import’:

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Viewing the blog again, you’ll now see that the example posts that I wrote in Blogger are now on my WordPress site, and even the categories have transferred over!
Check that the permalinks are working, and if they are not, simply search for plugins in the backend of WordPress that help with ‘Blogger permalinks’ and you’ll find loads of them to help you.
However, the latest versions of Blogger and WordPress seem to have integrated these features and the links on my example blog worked flawlessly.

Transfer your feed (keep your subscribers)
Login to FeedBurner, go into the feed and click on “Edit Feed Details.” Change your Original Feed to http://your-domain-name.co.uk/feed/
If you want to use Feedburner with WordPress then FeedSmith (owned by FeedBurner) is a WordPress plugin that integrates the two services perfectly.

Final Step: Change over the URL
Go back into your Blogger account and click on ‘Settings’ and then ‘Publishing’. Then select ‘Custom Domain’.

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You’ll then be given the option to buy a domain for your blog, you already own a domain, so click ‘Switch to advanced settings’.

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You can then enter your domain name, type in the verification word and you are nearly finished.

Add this to your blogger html
Still in Blogger, go to ‘layout’, then ‘edit html’ and paste in the following code anywhere after <head>:
<meta content=’0; url=http://YOURNEWURL.com/’ http-equiv=’refresh’/>
This will move visitors from your Blogger account to your new domain, without wrecking your Google ranking.
You can now happily blog away, with your fancy new WordPress install, on your own domain name whilst retaining all of your old posts and all of your hard-fought-for readers.