February 26, 2014

Many bloggers start out with an urge to write and publish without any clear idea of their options when it comes to content management systems. They choose a platform like Blogger, which is Google’s blog platform, and it works fine for them — for a while at least. After some time they frequently find themselves pushing against the limits of Blogger’s capabilities and wanting to take more control of the experience that they provide to their readers.

For bloggers who have outgrown Blogger, a self-hosted WordPress site is the perfect solution. In this article, I would like to look at some of the reasons that the move from Blogger to WordPress is the intelligent choice in many situations, and then show you just how easy it is to make the leap.

Why Move From Blogger To Self-Hosted WordPress?

The Hosting Business Model

We all know that Google has a propensity to kill services when it suits their interests. They are an advertising company, and their core revenue comes from advertising. A hosting company’s revenue comes from customers who buy hosting services. The incentives for each are different. Blogger could have its plug pulled at any time if Google feels that it is more work than it is worth, just as happened with Google Reader. Google would lose nothing by doing this, because Blogger is incidental to their revenue. Web hosting companies depend totally on the revenue generated by hosting clients, so they are incentivized to provide the best and most reliable product over the long term.

More Flexibility

Users of Blogger are limited in the changes they can make to the functionality and appearance of sites. WordPress.com users are similarly limited. Self-hosted WordPress users are completely free to modify their site in any way they like. Normally, increased flexibility means increased complexity, but modern hosting companies will take care the installation and much of the management, so a self-hosted WordPress site isn’t difficult to manage for even less technically inclined individuals.

Migrating A Blogger Blog To WordPress

I’m going to assume that you already have your WordPress installation up-and-running at your new hosting company with a domain name.

Importing Content

Getting your content from Blogger to WordPress is very simple. WordPress has a built-in importer that will take the content from your Blogger site and properly integrate it with a WordPress site. Once you have your WordPress instance set up, you can find the Blogger Importer in the Admin panel under the Tools menu. It’s important that you use this method of importing your content for the next phase to work.

Redirecting From Blogger To WordPress

If you were to do this manually, it would be fairly complicated. Thankfully there is a plugin that will take care of the details for you. Blogger To WordPress will help you to create a one-to-one mapping between the content that exists on your Blogger site and the newly imported versions on your WordPress site. When a reader goes to a page on the old Blogger site, they will be automatically redirected to the same content on WordPress.

And that’s about all there is to it. If you were worried about the move from Blogger to WordPress being complicated, I hope I’ve put your mind at rest and satisfied you that once you’ve outgrown Blogger, there’s no reason to hesitate in making the move.

Nexcess
Nexcess

Nexcess, the premium hosting provider for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento, is optimized for your hosting needs. Nexcess provides a managed hosting infrastructure, curated tools, and a team of experts that make it easy to build, manage, and grow your business online. Serving SMBs and the designers, developers, and agencies who create for them, Nexcess has provided fully managed, high-performance cloud solutions for more than 22 years.


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