I recently migrated my Blogger blog over to a Word Press blog hosted at GoDaddy. I thought it might be helpful to post my experience and some helpful resources I used to accomplish the process. It was a relatively painless effort with the only down time being the Godaddy process of pointing to my new blog. This took less than 12 hours but they do warn that it could be 24 hours. I’d recommend pulling the trigger late at night (unless your site is geared to a late night crowd.) A short post to the Blogger blog warning of upcoming down time is also a smart move that I thought of after it was too late. If you’re using Twitter as a toll (you should be) you can also tweet about the down time.
Before I get into the transfer process let me give you some history. I purchased my domain (BlacknGoldNation.com) from GoDaddy.com
. I set up a blog in Blogger and followed the Blogger instructions for pointing a custom domain to their servers. They had very good instructions specific to GoDaddy domains and that was a very easy and seamless process. It involved going to “Total DNS” in Godaddy’s Domain Manager and changing the www setting to a Google server.
I also already had a GoDaddy.com Deluxe Hosting Plan account for another blog I was running (ShoestringVacations.com).
The first thing I did was go to GoDaddy account through FTP and set up a new folder in my Primary Domain (ShoestringVacations.com in my case). I currently have a Deluxe account which I’ll be upgrading to Unlimited very soon. I added a new folder under the primary domain named ‘blackngoldnation’. I then went to manage the hosing account. Clicked “Add Domain”. Choose the new domain (blackngoldnation.com in my case) Choose to add it to the hosting account. I then went to manage domains and chose ‘Applications’. I chose to install the current version of WordPress. I pointed the installation to the new folder location. I changed their defaul install location from WORDPRESS to BLOG. I like the generic aspect plus it’s easier to type when you need to access your settings. It took about 2 or 3 hours for GoDaddy to finish setting up the database etc for my new Word Press install. At this point I’ll assume you’ve worked with Word Press. I didn’t worry about a new WP theme for now. I wanted to be sure I had my Blogger content imported before I tweaked anything. At this point I found a great post on Tech Ravings. You can see this at http://tinyurl.com/b92xfd . There is a very helpful tip there. Before going through the import process in WP you should change the permalink settings. This will ensure that Google and other search engines will not see any change to the structure and any good rankings you might have built will be retained.
Go to your WP settings. This will be http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/blog/WP-ADMIN or http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/WORDPRESS/WP-ADMIN if you didn’t change the default installation folder. Here you want to choose the “Settings” tab on the left margin. Then choose “Permalinks” option under ‘Settings’. Choose the custom option and paste the following /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html . Thsi is the default Blogger format so your posts will retain their current structure. You can change this permalink setting later if your like.
Now you’re ready to import the posts from Blogger. On your WP-ADMIN screen chosse ‘Tools’ in the left margin. Choose ‘Import’, then choose Blogger from the list and fllow their easy instructions. That’s the import process. From here you’ll want to change your theme, and add some plugins. That’s the biggest advantage to WP over Blogger. The ability to easily add plugins to customize your blog. I’ll be poting my list of suggested plugins plus some themes I’m currently using in upcoming posts.
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