So, as a blogger at heart, I’ve been dabbling in personal blogging. I’ve experimented with different WP setups and domains, and was never really happy. I decided to give blogger a go, and I really enjoyed it. I love WordPress, but there’s no problem being versatile! A lot of the personal blogs I follow are on blogger, so why not?
My domain and site transitions began with TheLovelyCurves.Com, but then I bought BeautieNerd.Com. I had all of my stuff there, but it seemed too impersonal, so I moved everything to nicoleisms.net (on blogger), a domain I bought a while ago.
Move your posts
Now, I think there is a way to export WordPress posts into a Blogger blog. The way I imagine it would be done is: In WordPress, go to Tools > Export. Then, use this app to make the export file usable on Blogger. Then, go into your Blogger dashboard and under Settings > Basics press ‘Import Blog’. That should be it!
I only had a few posts I wanted to move over, so I did that manually.
ProTip: Windows Live Writer is great for writing blogger posts!
Custom Domains
If you’re going to be moving all of your posts over, all you have to do is set up your custom domain with blogger. Here are a few tutorials I used.
How do I use a custom domain name for my blog?
WWW. and Naked Domains
Just wait a few, and your domain should work! If it doesn’t, revert back to the you.blogger.com and redo the addition of the custom blog.
What about my old domain?
To avoid losing my links, I wanted my old domain to forward to my new one. I thought it would be as easy as going into GoDaddy and forwarding it, but it wasn’t. If you do that, then your posts will get 404′s. Let me explain. If I have a post like this: oldomain.com/some-post, and I want to to forward to www.newdomain.com, GoDaddy will send it to www.newdomain.com/some-post, but some-post doesn’t exist! How do we fix this?
If your blog is small, there is hope! This is what I did: I made sure my old blog worked, and went into my old WP admin. I added a plugin named Page Links To. For the few posts thatI did move over, I copied that URL into the little blox that the plugin made.
So, now oldomain.com/copied-post will forward to www.newdomain.com/copied-post.
Any post that I didn’t copy over, I just wrote my new domain in the URL box. So, oldomain.com/non-copied-post will forward to www.newdomain.com!
To finish it off, I went into Settings > Reading and changed my front page display to a new page I made, entitled ‘Home’. Guess what I’m putting in the URL box?
This leaves us with a SEO friendly forwarding of an old domain to a new one, and the WP-admin is still accessible! Yay! I did all this over the course of a few frustrating hours, but it all worked in the end.
If you have any questions, or I forgot something, let me know!
