Moving your blog can be a little traumatic. I know a few bloggers who start perspiring nervously at the mere thought of it.

Lets, just for a second, pretend it was easy and that there are tools and plugins that will literally do this for you.

How hard can it be … right?

Take three deep breaths and lets take a look.

In this post we assume that you have already registered your domain and setup your hosting. Your WordPress is installed and you are ready to begin moving your content from your blogspot.com blog.

For this example we created a sample blogspot blog and will attempt to import a post from http://plantpower1.blogspot.com/ to http://plantpower.co.za/

Step 1: Import Your Posts and Images

Login to your wordpress blog. Navigate to Tools -> Import. Click on the Blogger option.

WordPress will automatically attempt to install the blogger importer plugin. Click “Install Now ‘ to complete the process.

Activate the importer plugin.

WordPress will ask you to give it access to your blogger account. Click the “authorize” button

Click the ” Allow access”  button to confirm WordPress access to your blogger account.

Your almost done. Click the Import button.

Select the Author (if you have multiple Authors) and click save changes.

Well done you have just imported your blogger posts. Click on the ” review posts” option to see your imported posts.

Here you can see my imported post from my blogspot.com blog.

Here is the imported post in WordPress. Now, how hard was that? …

Step 2: Set your Permalinks in WordPress

In WordPress you can adjust your link structure using Permalinks. You can find the Permalinks feature under Settings -> Permalinks. When we design websites we always change the permalinks to make the link structure of the site more SEO and user friendly.  For example; our sample post above with a default Permalink structure would be http://plantpower.co.za/?p=59

That’s not a very SEO friendly URL.  Editing the default Permalink can change it to be more in line with what search engines prefer. Since you have imported your posts from Blogger you should try and keep the WP link structure as close to it as possible.  A typical blogger link looks like this http://plantpower1.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-is-sample-post_28.html

Lets change our Permalinks to match that as close as possible.

Set your Permalink structure to Month and name then save your settings.

All your posts should now have a new link structure similar to the ones on your blogger site.

Are you feeling like a real tech savvy blogger yet ;0)

Step 3: Set up Redirection

So what happens to the old posts on your blogger blog?  How do you make sure they deliver traffic to the same posts on the new WordPress blog? In other words how do we re direct traffic from old links like http://plantpower1.blogspot.com/ to new links like  http://plantpower.co.za/ and from posts on blogger like http://plantpower1.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-is-sample-post_28.html  to new posts on WordPress like  http://plantpower.co.za/2014/05/the-koala-conspiracy/

Plugins! … silly.

First  navigate to your blogger account, log in and click on templates.

Scroll down to the very bottom and click on the  revert to classic template link.

Head back to your WordPress blog and install the Blogger to WordPress Redirection plugin.

To install the plugin navigate to Plugins. Click “Add New” in the search field, type “Blogger to WordPress redirection” and click the search plugins button.

Click Install Now and activate the plugin like you did earlier with the blogger importer plugin.

After you installed the plugin you can find it under Tools – Blogger to WordPress Redirection. Click the “Start Configuration”  Button

A list of the blogs you have imported will appear. Click the Get Code button

Copy the code. This code is what you will use to redirect your blogger posts to your WordPress posts. Head back to your blogger site (you’re almost done just a little more) and find your template editing area. This is the “revert to classic template” setting you enabled earlier.

Select EVERYTHING! inside the text area and replace it with the new code. [ I suggest copying the old template into a simple text document first. That way you can always restore the blogger template if anything goes wrong.] Save the template and test to see if your redirects work.

Congratulations! you just moved your blogger site and redirected any future visitors to your new WordPress blog. All thats left is to redirect your blogger feed.

Step 4: Redirect your Blogger feed

No real challenge here. To redirect your feed in blogger navigate to settings -> other.

Simply type in your WordPress feed URL into the Redirect URL field and save your settings. You are done.

I hope this post helps you understand what’s involved if you decide to move your blog. WordPress is highly customizable and with an every growing community of designers that embrace it, support is just a tweet or a comment away.

Let me know how it goes …

Oh! I almost forgot. Now that you are on, or at least thinking about a self hosted WordPress site I can show you how to get search engines to index your blog super fast.