I recently moved this blog over to WordPress from Blogger (for a few reasons). I thought the process would be easy: Just download all the blog info from Blogger and use the Blogger Importer plug-in, right? Turns out, it’s a little more complicated.
I wish I’d read this helpful blog post by Ryan Sullivan, which outlines step-by-step what is necessary to make this move. Pretty much everything you need is there, but I did want to point out a couple of things:
1) One key step was making sure all my old URLs stayed the same, so that any links I received would still be valid. The thing I missed was that even with my new WordPress URLS formatted in the same way as new Blogger URLs, they still weren’t QUITE identical. For instance, a post on my old blog might have this format:
davechen.net/2014/10/why-i-helped-produce-layover.html
But now, that same blog post URL is formatted like this:
davechen.net/2014/10/why-i-helped-produce-layover/
Thus, all my old links were broken. My brother had to write a script that re-directed all old URLs to their new destinations. Blogger really killed me with those .htmls!
2) Adding open graph meta tags to WordPress is important for SEO/sharing purposes.
3) All my old images are still hosted on Blogger. This is okay, because at least the old posts still look the same, but it’s not ideal. For some reason my Blogger Importer did not download all the images to the new WordPress instance. I will need to figure out some way of managing this going forward.
Overall, the process just took a lot more work than I would’ve liked. But I think things are in a good place now and am pretty sure that migrating out of WordPress (should I ever want that) will be a good deal easier.
(Image by CollegeDegrees360, used under CC)