Blogger is a free blogging platform from Google. You do not need to buy any domain or hosting to set up a blog on blogger, though getting a custom domain is recommended.
On the other hand, WordPress is free but it needs hosting. WordPress or WP is one of the most used CMS in the world.
Some of the beginners do start their blog on Blogger and once it grows (starts making money) they start looking for migrating to WP due to the advantages of using WP. I am one of this kind.
So if you want to know how I migrated from Blogger to WordPress without losing ranking (and sanity), keep on reading…
Do you want a scientific evaluation to check if the niche you selected is good as per your aptitude, check out the Niche Finding Tool post
Is Blogger To WordPress Any Good?
The simple answer to “is a blogger to WordPress any good” is it depends. It depends on why are you considering moving from Blogspot to WP.
Following are few scenarios, check where you sit and decide accordingly:
Move to WordPress from Blogger if:
- You are finding it difficult to enhance/customize Blogger as it needs coding
- You are not able to leverage new technologies like Web stories on blogger
- You are not happy with the blogger permalink structure
Do not migrate to WordPress from Blogger if:
- You do not have money/don’t want to invest in Hosting
- You want to continue blogging as a hobby
Migrating from Blogger To WordPress
Now, if you decided to move to WordPress, the biggest challenge is migrating your posts to the new platform.
There are many YouTube videos describing how to make the smooth transition but there are a few flaws in their approach.
- They advocate “as is” migration i.e you continue with the permalink structure of Blogspot.
- They assume that the post title and permalink are the same (the migration tool takes the Title as a permalink)
- Only posts are migrated, you have to still create pages.
- In case you are changing the domain name, the redirection provided is not good for the user experience.
So if not this, what is a better approach? I will share my approach where I migrated from Blogspot to WordPress and maintained the ranking.
Here also there are two scenarios,
- You are moving to a different domain
- You already had a custom domain on blogger and want to continue with it.
In my case, I had a few posts that were valid only for the Indian audience but it was part of the blog that had a large US audience.
So I decided to create a subdomain in WordPress and move my posts to the new subdomain.
Note: Hostinger has stopped the subdomain creation process if your main domain is not hosted with them but Bluehost provides this functionality.
So I took the following steps:
- Bought Bluehost hosting
- Created a subdomain
- Copy pasted my posts one by one from Blogger to WP and formatting
- I started with posts that were new/getting fewer visitors so that I can understand the difficulties and remove them so that my money-earning posts migration is easy.
- Downloading a backup from a blogger and uploading it in WP using the free WP tool is also an option but it messes with the images.
- Set the permalink structure to that of DomainName/Keyword
- Made the new post canonical
- Added javascript code for redirection in the post.
- The redirection was not a good user experience so I moved to a different approach as in the next point
- Added re-direction in Cloudflare
- It allows only 3 free re-directions
- Wait for 1 week so that Google starts indexing new URL
- Repeat steps 3 to 8 for the next 3 posts. Updating redirection on Cloudflare to New post
- Added subdomain in Adsense account.
- You can do this step after migrating a few posts as well.
Once all the posts were moved to WP, within 2-3 weeks I gained full traffic on my new URL!!.
Pros & Cons Of my migration approach:
This was a good time for me to change the url slug, based on which keyword was getting the most traffic, i updated my new slug to include that keyword removing to less performing slug.
| Pros | Cons |
| The post formatting and permalink structure were as per my choice. | The migration was manual and took time. |
| There was minimal traffic loss. | Traffic was on the lower side for the time of migration. |
| I regained traffic within 2 weeks of full migration | |
| The posts were fully SEO optimized |
Alternate migration approach
I did not want to spend money on migration as my earnings were pretty low, hence I took this approach where I paid only for Hosting.
In case your earnings is good, you can pay for Cloudflare redirection and your migration will be without any traffic loss.
Even though the manual process is slow and tedious, It gave me the opportunity to further optimize my articles, image alt text etc as I was more experienced now than when I started.
Conclusion:
Migrating from Blogger to WP is tricky but not rocket science. You can do it by following my approach.
WP offers more flexibility than blogger, so if earning money is your priority and you do not want to spend more time in managing the technical part of the blog than writing it, WordPress is the way to go.
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