I've got a confession. I'm a serial blogger. I find a new platform to play with every once in a while, and I'll start a new blog. I hate deleting that blog a year later just because I don't want to pay to host it anymore. I'd rather keep all my blogs, whether regularly updated or semi-maintained. Fortunately, I can keep them all in one place for free by using Blogger.
Moving a blog from WordPress to Blogger is actually fairly simple as long as you've got administrative access to your WordPress blog. Google's Chicago office is the home to an engineering team that actually makes this pretty easy: The Data Liberation Front. Their goal is to make it easy to move data to and from any Google tool, and while they don't have a tool to directly move your WordPress site to Blogger with a single click, they've simplified the process and host the open-source resources we need.
One thing that won't import is the general look and feel of your blog. That's handled by the theme. You can pick a new theme in Blogger, but you can't import your WordPress theme.
First Step - Export
The first thing you'll do to export your WordPress blog. If it's a single person blog you maintain, this usually isn't a problem.
- Log in to your account wherever you're hosting it. In my case, I'm using a blog hosted on my own domain with my own installation of WordPress software. You may have started a blog on WordPress.com. The process is the same.
- Go to the Dashboard.
- Click on Tools: Export
- You'll get some options here, so if you want only the posts or only the pages, you can do that. In most cases, you'll want to export both.
- Click on Download Export File.
You'll end up downloading an export file with a name that looks something like "nameoftheblog.wordpress.dateofexport.xml" This is an XML file specifically designed as a backup of WordPress content. If your intent is to move your blog from one WordPress server to another, you're set. In this case we need to massage the data to get it to the format we need.
The Second Step - Conversion
The Data Liberation Front hosts an open source project called the Google Blog Converters, which is designed to do exactly what we need. The WordPress to Blogger conversion tool will take that XML file and change the markup into Blogger's format.
- Upload your file using the WordPress to Blogger tool.
- Press Convert.
- Save your converted file to your hard drive.
In this case, you're going to get a file named "blogger-export.xml." The only thing that's really changed is the XML markup.
The Final Step - Import
Ok, now you've got your old blog data converted to a format for Blogger. Now you've got to import that blog into Blogger.
You could start a new blog, or you could import your content into an existing blog. The dates of your posts will be whatever date they were on WordPress, so if you had an old blog you forgot about or didn't realize you could import, this is a good way to backfill your content.
- Log into Blogger, and go into the settings for your blog. The steps you use to get there may vary a little, depending on whether you're using the old or new version of the Blogger dashboard.
- Go to Settings: Other
- Click on Import Blog
- You'll need to browse for your blogger-import.xml. (Don't try the original WordPress file. It won't work.) You may need to enter some CAPTCHA text. This is to prevent someone from using a script to hack your account and import a bunch of spam posts.
- Choose whether or not to automatically publish all posts. Uncheck this box if you want your posts to be imported as draft posts. It might be a good idea if you want to preview your work and make sure everything imported as expected.
Congratulations, you're done. Inspect your posts to make sure your images and content made the trip.
Once everything is imported successfully, don't forget to let everyone know the blog has moved and hide your old blog. In WordPress, this is located in the Dashboard under Settings: Privacy. You should at least hide it from search engines, even if you elect to keep the posts publicly visible. You're welcome to leave both blogs as is, but this might be confusing to blog visitors. It might also impact your placement in Google search results, since duplicating content might make you look like a spam blog.
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