Moving from Blogger to Wordpress
Recently, I’ve reached the point, like probably many bloggers have, where I’ve outgrown Blogger.
Don’t get me wrong, Blogger was great to use as I began my blogging journey. A freely-hosted blog is probably the best way to test the waters, so you don’t spend $10 on a domain and who knows how much on hosting for a blog that’ll be dead in a few months. It’s just that hacking functionality into Blogger, when that functionality can easily be gained through a WordPress plugin, gets old after a while. And besides, I had to do something with my new server 
.
The main problem with moving is that free services like Blogger give you very, very little control over the server. The best way to maintain whatever incoming links and “Google juice” you’ve built up, assuming you’re moving to a new domain, is to set up a 301 Permanent Redirect to the new blog. And, well, Blogger doesn’t like that idea .
The next best thing, though nowhere near as desirable, is to setup various client-side redirects, and hope that at least one of them works. This, of course, pretty much leaves behind whatever link juice you may have, but it’s better than users coming to a seemingly dead blog without some way to find the regularly-updated version.
Here’s what I did: throughout the course of using blogspot, I’ve been using “post pages”, which is essentially a permalink. You can setup self-hosted WordPress to use the .htaccess file to redirect users from the old URL version (with year, month, and trailing .html) to the new version used by WordPress. For details, see BlogBloke.com’s article (currently under construction, see the google cached version). To test if your implementation works (after importing all your Blogger posts), pull up an article on the blogspot blog, replace the blog.blogspot.com in the url with your WordPress blog’s base address, and hit enter. You should be redirected to that same article on your WP blog.
As for performing the actual redirect, there are several ways to go, including javascript, meta redirects, and plain links within your pages. I set up a simple javascript redirect that goes in the head of the blog template. This takes the current URL, replaces the blogspot part with the new blog’s URL, and sends the user there. Instant client-side redirect, provided the user has javascript enabled.
// <![CDATA[
document.location.href=document.location.href.replace(/oldblog.blogspot.com/, "newblog.com");
// ]]>
</script>
I put this directly under the title tags, so it would be executed as soon as possible. Then, it occurred to me to move the Google Analytics tracker code above that, so that I would still receive stats from that site.
Note: The CDATA tags are from the fact that New Blogger templates use XML. Occasionally, I would get issues with using my javascript without CDATA tags surrounding the code. These may or may not be necessary.
In addition to the javascript redirect, I put a Text widget above the main blog content, alerting users to the new location, in case they’ve disabled javascript.
I wouldn’t recommend using a meta tag redirect, unless you can somehow incorporate the current article’s URL into it. You don’t want to auto-redirect the user from the article they want to read to the homepage of your new blog, even if you give them a 6-second warning. It’s just downright inconsiderate. If you can’t “seamlessly” redirect them, tell them how they can get to the new place, and leave it at that.
Once you’ve got the web-based redirects working, you need to take care of your RSS readers. If you used Blogger (which, since you’re reading this, I assume you have), check out their RSS redirect service. If you’re using FeedBurner, it’s almost as simple. FeedBurner has acquired a FeedBurner WordPress plugin called FeedSmith. Simply install the plugin, re-burn your FeedBurner feed (”Edit feed details” from your feed’s dashboard, and enter your WordPress feed, which should be at http://blog.com/feed/), and enter your FeedBurner URL in the appropriate field in WordPress’s Settings → FeedBurner page. Your existing readers shouldn’t notice any change (they may receive duplicate entries of your recent articles), and any future subscribers will be redirected to your FeedBurner feed.
I think saying that it’s “downright inconsiderate” is a little strong. Here’s my argument: If you are a user coming from google, and you end up in a place that is no longer supported or live (your old blogger blog), you are not going to go through the extra trouble to end up in the new place (As in clicking through the message box). You will assume that it is bad, and you will immediately bounce. In our solution, you only experience the 6 second redirect on the front page. But if you go to a single post, it pretty seamlessly redirects you. We also use a branded message so that it seems a little bit more legit (at least in our case).
I can understand where your coming from, but one is very limited in options when it comes to moving from blogger to a self-hosted wordpress. It’s unfortunate, because we would pay to be able to host a .htaccess 301 redirect file on Blogger’s server. It would be so much easier, and create an actual revenue stream for Blogger, which I think they should enjoy.
Anyway, it seems there are plenty of solutions to this issue, and they all seem to work relatively well. My main argument with what I currently found was how complicated instructions were, when I just wanted a simple copy+paste method.
Have a good one,
-Jimmy
Jimmy,
If you’re only performing a meta redirect on the home page, that’s alright. My main argument against using it was that it would redirect to the new home page every time; if a user comes to a specific article, and is redirected to your new homepage in 6 seconds, whether they like it or not — you can see how inconsiderate that might be.
However, looking at your article again, I still don’t see how it redirects from only the front page. Doesn’t placing it between the head tags in the HTML put it on every page? Shouldn’t there be some sort of conditionals? Or is the idea that the meta redirect is preempted by the page-specific javascript? I suppose that would do the trick.
You are right… It is preempted by the page specific javascript. At the end of the post I wrote, you can click the post-specific link to see how it will boot you over to the new site’s corresponding post pretty much right away. Hopefully most users won’t notice or care about what’s happening as long as they get to where they want to be.
You might be right in saying that it would be a little more congenial to get rid of the meta-redirect and just post the message (for those reaching just the main blog), but I’d rather try and get them to our new home before they bounce back to the search engines.
Have a good one,
-Jimmy