How to Migrate your Blog from Blogger to WordPress

Your blog (abc.blogspot.com) is hosted on Blogger but you would now like to move your blog from Blogger to WordPress (self-hosted) with a personal domain name like abc.com. What is the easiest way to switch from Blogger to WordPress without losing search traffic and your existing subscribers?

WordPress provides an easy one-click option for importing blog posts and reader comments from Blogger into a new WordPress blog but there’s more to migration than just transferring content. For instance:

• Some of your articles on the old blogspot blog could be ranking very high in search engines for certain keywords but once you move these articles to a new WordPress blog, you will lose the organic search traffic since the permalinks (or URLs) of your blog posts will change.
 
• People often land on your blog through search engines, browser bookmarks and via other web sites that have linked to your blog pages. If you migrate to WordPress, Blogger would not automatically redirect the incoming traffic to your new website.
 
• When you switch from Blogger to WordPress, existing readers who are subscribed to your Blogger RSS Feed may be lost forever if they don’t manually subscribe to your new WordPress feed address (and most won’t).

The Importer tool available inside WordPress will only transfer content from Blogger to WordPress but if would also like to take care of each and every issue listed above, follow this step-by-step tutorial. It takes less than 5 minutes to complete and the method will also help transfer that Google Juice from the old blogspot.com address to your new WordPress blog.

How to Move a Blog from Blogger to WordPress 

Important: Before you start the migration, it may be a good idea to backup your Blogger blog including the XML template, blog posts and comments just to be on the safe side.

1. Register a new web domain, buy hosting and install WordPress on your new domain.  Hostgator is an excellent web host.
 
2. Open your WordPress Admin Dashboard and under Tools -> Import, select the Blogger option. Authorize WordPress to access your Blogger Account, select your blogspot.com blog and within minutes, all your Blogger blog posts and comments will be available on the new WordPress site.
 
3. Open the WordPress themes editor under Appearance -> Editor and open the functions.php file for editing. Most WordPress themes include a functions.php file or you can upload it manually into your WordPress themes folder through cPanel or FTP. Copy-paste the following snippet of code inside your functions.php file and click the “Update File” button to save your changes.  Make sure all instances of sublimemaxxus in the code below is replaced with your Blogger.com site name.
   

<?php
 
function sublimemaxxus_blogger_query_vars_filter( $vars ) {
  $vars[] = "blogger";
  return $vars;
}
 
add_filter('query_vars', 'sublimemaxxus_blogger_query_vars_filter');
 
function sublimemaxxus_blogger_template_redirect() {
  global $wp_query;
  $blogger = $wp_query->query_vars['blogger'];
  if ( isset ( $blogger ) ) {
    wp_redirect( sublimemaxxus_get_wordpress_url ( $blogger ) , 301 );
    exit;
  }
}
 
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'sublimemaxxus_blogger_template_
redirect' );
 
function sublimemaxxus_get_wordpress_url($blogger_slug) {

  global $wpdb;
  if ( preg_match('@^(?:https?://)?([^/]+)(.*)@i', 
$blogger_slug, $matches) ) {
    $q = "SELECT guid FROM $wpdb->posts LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta
          ON ($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id)
          WHERE $wpdb->postmeta.meta_key='blogger_permalink'
          AND $wpdb->postmeta.meta_value='$matches[2]'";
    $wp_url = $wpdb->get_var($q);
  }
  return $wp_url ? $wp_url : home_url();
}
 
?>

4. Open your Blogger Dashboard and choose Templates. Scroll down the templates page and choose the “Revert to Classic Templates” option to switch from the XML-based Blogger templates to Tag based templates.
 
5. Copy-paste the following snippet into your Blogger template editor but before you do that, replace all occurrences of sublimemaxxus.com with your WordPress site URL. For instance, if your WordPress site is located at example.com, replace sublimemaxxus.com with example.com and paste the modified snippet in the template editor. Save the changes.

<html>
 <head>
    <title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>
    <script>
      <MainOrArchivePage>
          window.location.href='http://sublimemaxxus.com/'
      </MainOrArchivePage>
      <Blogger> <ItemPage>
          window.location.href='http://sublimemaxxus.com/?q=
<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>'
      </ItemPage> </Blogger>
    </script>
    <MainPage>
      <link rel="canonical" href="http://sublimemaxxus.com/" />
    </MainPage>
    <Blogger><ItemPage>
      <link rel="canonical" href="http://sublimemaxxus.com/?blogger=
<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" />
    </ItemPage></Blogger>
 </head>
 <body>
    <MainOrArchivePage>
        <h1><a href="http://sublimemaxxus.com"><$BlogTitle$></a></h1>
    </MainOrArchivePage>
    <Blogger><ItemPage>
        <h1>
   <a href="http://sublimemaxxus.com/?blogger=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>">
            <$BlogItemTitle$>
          </a>
        </h1>
        <$BlogItemBody$>
    </ItemPage></Blogger>
 </body>
</html>

We are almost done. Open any page on your old Blogger blog and it should redirect you to the corresponding WordPress page. We are using a permanent 301 redirect on the WordPress side and therefore all the Google Juice and PageRank should pass to your new WordPress pages with time.

The above method works for regular blogspot.com URLs and also country-specific Blogger domains like blogspot.co.uk or blogspot.in that Google added about an year ago to better handle censorship related requests.


The Blogger Import tool moves only posts and comments from Blogger to WordPress but not images. And that should be fine because the image URLs in your imported WordPress posts are still pointing to blogspot.com (where the images were originally hosted) and therefore nothing would break.

Switch RSS Feed from Blogger to WordPress 

When you move from Blogger to WordPress, the URL of your RSS feed will change as well. Go to Blogger -> Settings -> Other and choose Post Feed Redirect URL under Site Feed. Here you can type the web address of your new WordPress RSS feed here and the existing RSS subscriber will automatically move to your new feed.

If you are using FeedBurner, just replace the source from Blogger RSS feed to your new WordPress feed.


Migration to WordPress Complete – What Next? 

Now that your new WordPress site is up and running with all the old Blogger posts, here are a few important things you should do:

1. Add your new WordPress site to Google Webmaster, verify the site ownership and and also submit a XML Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site.
 
2. Implemet Google Authorship so that your profile pictures appears against your article in Google Search results.
 
3. Follow these WordPress optimization tips, install some of the essential plug-ins and pay special attention to improving the security of your WordPress site.

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5 Of The Best WordPress Video Plugins

Being one of the most popular content management systems, Wordpress happens to be an excellent platform for open source blogging. With its new video sharing option, Wordpress bloggers have found a happy way to post videos via blogs. A plenty of video plugins have been released so far to help you add videos to your blogs. So what does this video plugins actually do? These plugins, once installed into your Wordpress, lets you to add and share videos to your blog. Each video plugin comes with its own unique feature. Here, in this blog you will get to know about five Wordpress plugins, which can be said the best.

WordPress video gallery

This video plugin developed by Apptha comes with an in-built HDFLV player. It has a video banner displaying the featured, recent and popular videos. You tube videos can be easily added to your blog if this plugin is installed. It comes with a HTML5 support in order to play videos in iOS devices.

With this plugin, it is easy to share your videos via social networking sites. At the back end, you have choices for video description, video commenting and video tags. Facebook commenting is directly enabled from your blog. It comes with six different stylish skins, from which you can choose the desired one.

Simple Flash Video

Simple Flash Video is developed by Simple Thought Productions , This wordpress video plugin, allows an easy posting of video files with .flv and .mp4 extensions to your blogs. The viewers need not have to download the entire video before watching. They can instantly watch the videos as they are posted. SFV (Simple Flash Video) has a deal with Long tail Video Site, that if a wordpress blogger has got a license for Long tail player, then you can easily make money with your videos.

Smart Youtube

Smart Youtube is another great video plugin, that plays youtube, vimeo, and meta cafe videos. The plugin supports all latest high quality video protocols like 360p and HD quality 720p. With this smart youtube video plugin, youtube videos and playlists can be inserted to your blog posts and RSS feeds in no time. The plugin has access to xHTML valid codes for viewing videos in full screen mode. Smart youtube plugin also works on iPad and iPhone. It supports video deep linking.

Embedded Video

This plugin supports the major video portals like Youtube, Google Video and Daily motion. With this embedded video plugin, you can easily embed videos to your wordpress blog. You can also upload and integrate videos from your web server or remote server. Embedded Video plugin works for WP2.5. The link text can be configured individually and the videos are integrated easily using the in-built WYSIWYG editor.

Cool Video Gallery

The cool video gallery plugin lets you to upload and manage videos in multiple galleries. It supports most of the common video formats like .mp4, .mov, .flv, and .mp3 files. This plugin has automatic image generation for uploaded videos. It comes with a multiple video upload feature. Google XML video sitemap generation is integrated in this plugin. The plugin enfolds widgets for slide show and showcase. You can also attach media files from the library to the video gallery in a single step.

So, these are a few Wordpress video plugins, which are found to be highly effective and common. Give a try and make your blog glow with videos!

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Uploading A WordPress Website From A Local To A Remote Installation

If you’re working on a local website for development and need to upload it either to go live or because you need to show a client or other team members your work, you’re going to need to upload your WordPress website. This is more complicated than moving from a sub-directory to the root directory, and involves moving three things:

• WordPress itself — you’ll need to install this in the new location;
• The database — which you can move using phpMyAdmin;
• Your theme files, uploads and plugins.

1. Turn Off Permalinks

Turn off pretty permalinks in the “Permalinks” screen, which you’ll find in the “Settings” menu. Do this by selecting the “Default” option and clicking “Save Changes.”

2. Backup the Database

Make a copy of the database and give it a new name (for example, by adding “old” to its name).

3. Install WordPress In the New Location and Upload Content 

Using your preferred method, install WordPress on the server you want to move your website to.  Don't have a web-hoster?  We recommend Hostgator.com.  You will receive a 25% discount on sign-up. Please use Coupon Code: sublimemaxxus when you register for th service.

Using FTP or SFTP, copy the files from your local “wp-content” directory to the remote “wp-content” directory, using the same folder structure as in your local install.

Go and have a cup of coffee. These files could take a while to upload.

4. Edit the Database 

Don’t just open the original database file from your local installation and edit it. DB data stored serialized will break if edited directly in a text editor. You are better off with a serialize-aware tool like Search-Replace-DB. Replace the old, local URL for the website with the new, remote URL.

For example, if your local URL is http://localhost/example, you would change it to http://example.com.

Using the “replace” command will speed this up — there could be thousands of instances. Save your new database.

5. Drop the Existing Remote Database

Note: This step only applies if you’ve used a script such as Softaculous or Fantastico to install WordPress, as they automatically create a new database. If you’ve installed WordPress manually, you can ignore this bit.

In phpMyAdmin, drop (delete) the database that was installed in the remote website when you installed WordPress:

• Select the database you’re working with.
• Click on the “Structure” tab.
• Below the list of tables, click “Check All.”
• In the drop-down menu which says “With selected,” select “Drop”:

• You will see a warning message checking that you want to drop all tables. Click “Yes.”
• Finally you will see a message telling you that your query has been implemented:

6. Upload the New Database

While you are still in phpMyAdmin, upload the database you’ve edited:

• Click the “Import” tab.
• Click the “Choose file” button.
• Select the database you saved in step 4 and click “Choose” or “OK.”
• Click the “Go” button.
• After a while (depending on the size of your database), you will see a message telling you the upload has successfully finished:

7. Clear Your Browser’s Cache

This avoids any problems you may have if the browser has cached content from the old version of the remote database.

8. Log Into the WordPress Admin For the Remote Website and Update Permalinks

Your log-in details will be the same as for your local website. If you specified different log-in details when installing remotely, these will have been overridden by the imported database.

Visit the “Permalinks” screen and turn pretty permalinks back on.

You’re done!

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