Moving from WordPress to Blogger: tutorial on how to do this!
Yes you read that right! It really says moving from WordPress to Blogger, and not the other way around.
But you should try telling Google that. As I was trying to find information about moving from WordPress to Blogger, Google kept offering results about moving from Blogger to Wórdpress. And I kept checking my query thinking: 'Didn't I say it right?'
Thankfully there is some information out there about moving from WordPress to Blogger but it's hard to find and scarce. So I figured I'ld do my bit and help other poor sods who want to leave WordPress for Blogger.
But first let me start by explaining why I wanted to move my blog back from WordPress to Blogger.
Moving from WordPress to Blogger: why I wanted to
I think I can explain it best my using a bowling metaphor! When my husband and I take our kids out bowling we usually have the bumpers up. That way you have a much better chance of hitting the bowling pins.
I think Blogger is like bowling with the bumpers up.
It's easier, and if you make a mistake you'll probably still score.
WordPress on the other hand is like bowling without the bumpers. If you make a mistake your ball hits the gutter and you get zero results for your efforts. It's harder and more complicated. You can really mess things up.
I moved from Blogger to WordPress about a year and a half ago. And I totally get that WordPress has more options. But the thing is: I don't really nééd all those options. I want to write stuff, and make it look pretty. And Blogger allows me to concentrate on my content, and makes it much easier for me to make my blog look good.
So that is why last week I was moving from WordPress to Blogger!
Moving from WordPress to Blogger: 12 steps
Let me start by saying I started my blog at Blogger. So I still had my Momfever blog up at Blogger because of the images. I had bought a domain name using Blogger at the time of my move to WordPress.
So I moved Momfever báck to Blogger.
And this is how I did it.
- Go to you WordPress dashboard and click on Tools
- Choose Export
- Choose what you want to export. You can export your whole blog, or just your posts or pages.
- Then click on Download Export file
- Now you have to make sure your wordpress file is suitable for Blogger. So head on over to WordPress2blogger.
- Upload your wordpress export file and click on convert.
- Now you've got a file you can upload to Blogger!
- Go to http://www.blogger.com and head on over to your blog
- Click on Settings
- Choose Other
- Click on import and choose the Blogger file you just created
- Now you've moved your WordPress blog to Blogger!
But wait, there's something else!
How to make sure your blog name goes to your Blogger blog and not your WordPress blog
This is where I ran into trouble! I couldn't figure out how to direct http://www.momfever.com to my Blogger blog instead of my WordPress blog. Turns out I had to adjust two things: DNS settings and Nameservers.
Warning: once you do this, you lose acces to your wordpress blog. So make sure you stripped it from everything you want to take with you to Blogger!
- In my case, because I had bought my domain name through Blogger I had to log into my Google Admin.
- Then click on Domains
- Click on Advanced DNS. Then I found my domain name was listed at GoDaddy! GoFigure.
- Log into your DNS console
- Click on your domain name, which in my case was momfever.com
- Click on Nameservers
- Choose Standard and then save
- Click on DNS Zone File. (Sometimes it takes a few minutes to be able to get into your DNS Zone File because the nameserver change hasn't taken effect yet.) Fill in like this:
Don't worry if it doesn't work immediately. It sometimes takes a couple of hours. But after that you should see your Blogger blog appear at your blog domain.
Fall out from moving from WordPress to Blogger
Broken images
I experienced some fall out from moving from WordPress to Blogger. Like all my images disappeared on my Google+ page and my Momfever Facebook page. That's because I had placed links to my post on Google+ and Facebook and waited for the thumbnail. The images in my pósts were broken too once I had changed my DNS settings and Name Servers.
So I had to put in all the images again!
If you want to avoid the disappearance of images, just upload the image from your blogpost from your desktop! And thén place the link to your post. That way it doesn't matter if you move your blog from WordPress to Blogger.
N.B Blogger is much kinder than WordPress: if you move from Blogger to WordPress all you images stay up. But if you change your dns settings you lose access to your WordPress blog and your pictures get broken.
I hope this helps other people who are considering moving from WordPress to Blogger. Because a tutorial like this would have saved me a whole lot of stress, and feeling like I was banging my head against a brick wall.
Broken links
I may have caused some broken links. Because Blogger has different permalinks than Blogger. If you move from Blogger to WordPress you can fix this, but not the other way around.
Other bloggers about moving from WordPress to Blogger
- Post from Blog Bloke about moving from WordPress to Blogger
- David Haimes about migrating from WordPress to Blogger
- The Computery
Summing up
Overall I feel moving from WordPress to Blogger was worth it. I feel like I've come home! Blogger feels like a warm bath. I can easily get my blog to look the way I want to, and I feel my posts do much better.
There are only 4 things I miss about WordPress. Those are:
- The ease of creating internal links
- The Yoast plugin: but I have several other blogs still on WordPress so I write my posts there, optimize them, and then copy and paste them into Blogger
- The word count of a post
- The plugin that let's you give people a preview of your post
But overall, I'm glad I did it.
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My sister has a WordPress blog that she finds very hard to work. She would like to move to Blogger but thinks she would lose her email list. Did you experience anything with your email list in the move? #turnituptuesday
I totally get your sister! What do you mean by email list exactly? Do you mean the feedburner subscription by email? To keep my subscribers I only had to change the url of the original feed.
Thanks for the information. Many have suggested I move to WordPress and I've been weighing the pros and cons. I have trouble now on Blogger using code and updating the look, and definitely wouldn't want any additional stress with code. Do you have any tips on changing the ad sizes/placement for Adsense?
Yes I meant the Feedburner subscription, although I don't know if that's what her WordPress blog uses. Thanks!
Stopping by from Turn It Up Tuesday. Interesting post, you're the first blogger that I know of to move from WordPress to Blogger. I've been on Blogger for years, and quite happy. Thanks for sharing, it really gives bloggers the pros and cons of both.
I just moved from Blogger to WP 🙂 Blogger is by far easier, I'm still *trying* to get use to WP. So far so good, I hope I do't end up with a zero…
Thanks for sharing via Mommy Monday.
XOXO
http://www.mrsaokaworkinprogress.com
Hi Tameka, what size do you want them to be? I suppose you've already tried changing the size using the Google Adsense gadget?
I have tried for a year and a half, and I've moved most of my blogs back to Blogger. But I still have about 3 on wordpress. I often optimize my post on wordpress and then I paste it in Blogger!
That way I get the best of both worlds.
I really think Blogger is getting a bad rap.
I'm so glad someone actually changed from WordPress to Blogger. Everyone seems to want to switch over to WordPress, but I find Blogger to be much nicer. I like that its easy to use and I can edit it enough myself in html to make it look nice. I don't really care about a lot of the plugins that WordPress has anyway.
I started blogging on Blogger, and have been happy so far, but have wondered if at some point I will want to make the shift to Word Press. This helps to balance the arguments to make the move that I have read. Thanks! I'm glad I found this on SITS Sharefest today, and I am pinning it as a future reference!
Hi Susan, I'm glad I could help! Sometimes I feel Blogger is getting a bad rap, and WordPress a bit too much praise.
Blogger definitely is easier to use. And if you're a blogger who wants to concentrate on her cóntent Blogger is a great way to do this.
Sometimes, I wish I had some of the plug-ins WordPress has but love Blogger because it is so user-friendly.
It really is Melissa. Though I certainly see the perks of WordPress I still like Blogger more.
Thanks for a great post, Nicole! I am on Blogger, but have done some work on WP, and therefore intend to stay on Blogger. 🙂 I dislike the misconceptions and myths that a lot of people seem to have about Blogger, but the important thing is I have found what works for me. As have you! 🙂 Thank you for sharing this with us at Treasure Box Tuesday- pinned! 🙂
Congrats on a successful, albeit, challenging move to Blogger 🙂 I have set up a Facebook group for Bloggers on Blogger! Feel free to email me at kathewithane @ yahoo.com if you'd like an invite to join. So much support and understanding in the group!
I just did this a few months ago and I felt exactly the same way...like I was coming home! You are right, there is virtually no information out there on how to migrate back. I had a great lady helping me and together we figured it out, but we ran into a lot of the same snags as you regarding photos and links. I wrote a long post about my experience at WordPress and why I came back, but I did not write the how to do it. I would love to include a link in my post to your post, I think it would help a lot of people. Let me know what you think...and welcome back!
I would love to join you Kathe! It can be a tad lonesome cheering Blogger on!
You're welcome to add a link to this post Kim! There are probably more people out there like us, looking for a way back to Blogger! And I would love to help them with this post.
I always love meeting other bloggers who really like Blogger! I know WordPress has a lot of perks, and I do have some blogs on wordpress.org. But I like Blogger better.
Hi Nicole,
I finally threw up my hands in despair over my WordPress blog. Apparently the code is hacked and I cannot see my live site. I am supposed to be able to go to php to fix. No theme works right. Thank goodness I can get to stuff in my admin, so I exported the site to a download.
However WordPress to Blogger no longer exists. I could totally cry because I have an old Blogger site I want to use. If anyone knows how to get my download over there, I would love to hear it. Otherwise I have started copying and pasting my posts to my Blogger site. Blogger lets you schedule the post, and I can go backwards on the dates, so if I posted something in March on WP, then I am pasting it and scheduling it for posting with date of last March. Looks like that is working.
This is huge amount of work, but is something I can do better than trying to fix coding.
I will be so relieved to be back on Blogger after almost 3 years of struggling with WordPress.