Blogger blogspot to self-hosted WordPress
Google Blogger is very simple and easy to start with blogs unless you start to think of custom plugins, widgets, tools and more advanced themes. Many of us are following this path that starts in google blogspot and then migrate to WordPress. You can find several pages comparing these two platforms and also many howto pages describing the WordPress installation. In this this post I will list plugins that I found necessary to run my new WordPress blog, describe how easy it is to migrate posts from blogspot to WordPress and also describe changes in my old blogspot to redirect traffic to the new self-hosted WordPress post.
Please note that WordPress can be self-hosted WordPress.org vs Free WordPress.com blog. I’ve decided for self-hosted and migrated to hosting for quite affordable price (1€/month) and cheap .eu domain (12€/year).
Essential plugins
Theme
You can find many free themes. My criteria was responsive and nice theme, so decided to go with Oblique theme. I did minor customization (changed the image) and I am quite happy, that this theme is really responsive and looks good in a phone, tablet and PC.
Migrate blog content from blogspot to WordPress
Plugin needed to export posts and pages from old blogspot, that really worked is Blogger Importer Extended plugin. It is easy to use and I had no issue to migrate the content from the old blog.
The tricky thing was to change all the links in posts referencing old blogspot.com pages. Plugin that changed links from old domain to the new one: Search Regex
If you open this should be searched in post content: ;http://homeduino.blogspot.com/ncr/\d+/\d+/([\w-]*).html;
and replaced with: /blog/$1
As you can see, I do not use dates in my URL and I have /blob/ prefix in my blog URI. The good thing is that you can firstly only Search before the final Replace & Save.
Other useful plugins
Plugin to add google analytic code to all your posts and also adds a new widget in dashboard: Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
Site Map generator that you can configure in webmaster tool: Google XML Sitemaps
The lightbox-plus plugin is used for nicer image viewing (just click on the image above to test it).
The next page is focused on redirecting traffic from the old blogspot blog to the one (redirect every post directly to the same post in the new domain).
Redirect traffic from old blogspot to the new WordPress
Select simple theme in blogspot.com and disable the mobile version. Click Edit HTML and right after these lines:
<b:section class='main' id='main' name='Main' showaddelement='no'> <b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'> <b:includable id='main' var='top'>
insert the following lines:
<b:if cond=';data:blog.pageType == "item"';>
<b:loop values=';data:posts'; var=';post';>
<script type=';text/javascript';>
var new_page=';rpi5:8080/';;
var permalink = ';<data:post.url/>';;
var timestamp = ';<data:post.timestamp/>';;
new_page = permalink.replace(/homeduino\.blogspot\.[a-z\.]+\/[0-9]{4}\/[0-9]{2}/,new_page);
new_page = new_page.replace(/\.html$/,';';);
document.location.href = new_page;
</script>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
<b:if cond=';data:blog.pageType != "item"';>
<b:loop values=';data:posts'; var=';post';>
<script type=';text/javascript';>
var new_page=';rpi5:8080/';;
var permalink = ';<data:post.url/>';;
var timestamp = ';<data:post.timestamp/>';;
new_page = permalink.replace(/homeduino\.blogspot\.[a-z\.]+\/p/,new_page);
new_page = new_page.replace(/\.html$/,';';);
document.location.href = new_page;
</script>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
That should redirect every post directly to the same post in the new domain (the first part is for blogger posts and the second for the blogger pages). Please change the lines to meet your requirements. I have used “[a-z.]+” instead of .com, so redirect works for all country domains (not only .com).
To not crawl your old blogs by search engines and to have redirect of the main page insert the following 2 lines between the
and tags of your old blog:<meta content='0;url=/' http-equiv='refresh'/> <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"/>
After seeing this, search engines should remove your old blog from their cache and the old content will stop existing for them. Therefore they are not going to penalize your new blog for duplicate content (hopefully).
Number “0” in the first line is the number of seconds before the redirect to the new WordPress blog.
In addition I have removed all the widgets, so the blogspot page is now clean. You can do it by removing all the widget blocks like this:
<b:widget id='Attribution1' locked='true' title='' type='Attribution'> <b:includable id='main'>...</b:includable> </b:widget>
After each removal (remove it one by one), save the template (just undo (CTRL+Z if there is any mistake) and check the new rendering in other window. At the end the blogspot looks like this:
All the steps are possible to do in 1 day (or better say 1 night) and now I will monitor the search engine, how long it will take them to take notice migration from blogspot to the self-hosted WordPress 😉 .
Tips in WordPress
It is so easy to split blog into meaningful parts. There are 4 different ways: