Chathura Jayasinghe

I have been using Google’s Blogger.com services for my blog since 2008. With Blogger, managing your blog is very easy and straight forward. There were also a reasonable number of nice templates available where I could make my blog different from others.

Also, Blogger’s new interface made life easier and I was pleased with the new features and template designs that they offered.

But, being a web designer and developer, I was never satisfied with layouts that someone else has designed because I couldn’t customize them in the way I wanted. At the same time I wanted my blog to be within my personal domain name, i.e., blog.chathuraj.com . So, I decided to transfer my blog into WordPress.

Before doing so, I had 2 questions in mind I needed to resolve:

1. Am I going to lose my blog history including old posts, comments, etc.?
2. How to I direct traffic I got for my Blogger to my new WordPress blog?

After doing some research, I came up with solutions for both my questions, and I now have a WordPress blog where I can customize the design and layout in the way I want; I didn’t lose any of my previous posts or comments; at the same time my blog is at http://blog.chathuraj.com and my previous URL (http://chathuraj.blogspot.com) has been redirected to http://blog.chathuraj.com.

In this post I’ll explain how I migrated my site. The transfer from Blogger to WordPress can be broken down into two main steps.

Step 01—Transferring Blogger Content into a WordPress Blog

To do this, first you need to install WordPress on your web server. (To learn about WordPress installation, go to: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress) Next, in WordPress, log into your admin panel using the username and password you assigned when installing WordPress.

In the admin dashboard, go to “Tools” select “Import” from the sub-menu appears—you will be directed to the “Import” page. Out of the options available, select “Blogger.” In the next step, you will have to authorize importing content—click “Authorize” button. Then, you will be prompted to log into your Google account. Once signed in, click on “Grant Access” button in the page appears.

When you grant access to you Google account, you will be directed to page where your content (posts, comments) listed in a table and with “Import” button on the right-hand side of the table. Click “Import” to import your content into WordPress blog.

Step 02—Directing Blogger to the New WordPress Blog

To do this, log in to you Blogger account. In the admin panel, go to “Settings” and select “Basic” settings from the sub-menu appears. Go to the section “Publishing” and click on the link “Add a custom domain.” Click on the link “Switch to advanced settings” from the form appears. In the advanced settings, type the sub domain name that you want to direct your Blogger blog to, and click “Save.”

When using this this method, you’ll get a warning message like below when the browser tries to redirect you to your sub domain. This might scare your viewers with the message “This blog is not hosted by Blogger and not has been checked for spam, viruses, and other forms of malware.”

To get rid of this problem, there are 2 methods that you can use.

1. Meta Tag Method

If you want to redirect your Blogger Blog using a Meta tag, then you can copy and the code below under the head section of your Blogger template. To edit the template, go to “Design,” then to “Edit HTML.”

Place your code after the <b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/> line.


<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL">


Replace “URL” with the full URL to your sub domain.

Note: If you use Meta tag method, be aware that Meta refresh redirects have been used by spammers to fool search engines. So search engines remove those sites from their database. If you use a lot of Meta refresh tags to redirect pages, the search engines may decide your site is spam and delete it from their index.

2. JavaScript Method

Similar to Meta tag method, go to “Edit HTML” and copy and paste the code below to the same location.


<script type='text/javascript'>
location.replace("URL");
</script>


Replace “URL” with the full URL to your sub domain.

Note: If you’re using the new Blogger interface, make sure that you switch back to older interface before you edit HTML. In the new interface, for some templates “EDIT HTML” button has been disabled and for the rest you’re not allowed to save the changes after editing.

All set now—type your Blogger URL in a web browser and see if that is being re-directed to your new domain name.

Enjoy &Happy Blogging!