How to Migrate a Self-Hosted Blogger Blog to a Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog

Download your free blog software at Wordpress.org.

If you should want to transfer all your Blogger blog files, archives, and images to a Wordpress blog, the tools to help you do that are fairly easy to use. This article applies to blogs that you host yourself on your own domain, not to blogs that are published at the free Blogspot.com or Wordpress.com sites.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• A web hosting account where you have been publishing your Blogger blog on your own domain
• FTP software to transfer files
• Nothing new is needed in this section

Getting Ready

1. Prepare your account with your host. First create a new MySQL database to connect to your Wordpress blog when you install it.

   Most web hosting companies offer a C-panel or an account interface of some sort that will allow you to perform tasks such as add a new database. Your web host must have PHP version 4.2 or greater and MySQL version 4.0 or greater. If these basics are not provided by your hosting company, you will be unable to install Wordpress.

2. When the database creation is complete, you'll see information about the database name, server name and some user names and passwords. Take note of these, especially the database server name.

3. Create a new directory in your web space where you can put the blog and test it prior to removing all the Blogger material. A subdirectory with a name like "blog" is all you need.

4. On your own computer, in the folder where you store the files for your website, add a new "blog" directory as well. You'll store the downloaded blog here while you configure a couple of bits, and you'll upload it to your server from this location.

Install the Blog and Run the Wordpress Import

1. Go to wordpress.org/download and download the latest version of Wordpress.

2. Unzip the download and move everything from the resulting Wordpress directory to the waiting "blog" directory within the site files of your existing site on your own computer.

3. Wordpress' famous five minute install instructions are probably all the help you need.

   Two steps to take before you upload the files to the server are:
   * Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
   * Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and fill in your database details.

   This is where you fill in the database information you saved when you created the new database.

   Wordpress says you can probably leave this line as is:
   define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

   If you get an error later when you try to log in, go back to this file and change 'localhost' to the actual database server name.

4. Use FTP to upload everything from the local "blog" directory to the waiting "blog" directory on your web server.

5. Go to http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php, with example.com being changed your own domain name. Take the simple steps to install the blog. Refer to Step 3 in this section if you get an error message about the database location.

6. When you've succeeded in completing the steps at wp-admin/install.php, log in to your blog at http://www.example.com/blog/wp-login.php, with your own domain name taking the place of example.com.

7. When you are logged in to the Wordpress blog, go to the Dashboard. Find Manage > Imports. Follow the steps for a Blogger import.

   (If you have published from Blogger to your site by FTP, see the warning note at the end of this article.)

8. When the import is complete, go to http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/ and test everything. Make changes, choose a theme, pick your plug-ins, and do all the Wordpress tasks you can find.

9. After thorough testing and debugging, you are ready to change the main page of your domain to the Wordpress index.php page, instead of the Blogger page. Until now, the index.php file has been inside the "blog" folder on your home computer and on your server.

10. Open index.php and change 'require('./wp-blog-header.php');' to
    'require('./blog/wp-blog-header.php');'

    Save the change.

11. Move index.php to the top level of your domain. (You may want to delete the old index.html from Blogger in that location after you know everything is working.)

    Now, when you go to www.yourdomain.com, you should see the new Wordpress blog.

Tips & Warnings

• Wordpress uses the RSS feed from Blogger to import the files. If you have anything in your Blogger settings that is meant to appear in a blog reader (as opposed to the actual blog post) you'll want to delete that before you import.

• Save space on your server by deleting all the old Blogger archives after you are sure that the new Wordpress blog is working right.

• Delete your blog from Blogger.com as a final cleanup.

• If you have published your Blogger blog to your domain by FTP, you will have to switch the blog over to a blogspot.com hosted account temporarily. Otherwise, Wordpress cannot find the archives and posts needed to do the import.

• Be sure that any themes and plugins you use with Wordpress are compatible with the version of Wordpress that you install. Otherwise you'll get all sorts of errors messages.

Resources

• Wordpress.org
• Blogger