If anyone’s curious about the process of moving from Blogger to WordPress, that’s exactly what I did last weekend. I wrote up a brief article explaining the steps over at my personal blog.
Basically, I made the switch after deciding to launch the Liliputing Forums. Up until recently, this site had been hosted by Google’s Blogger. And while the blog client was easy to use and I’d experienced very little downtime, it would have been pretty difficult to build a forums using the same domain name as the blog without purchasing a hosting plan and moving the blog to a new platform.
As an added benefit, I now have much more control over the look and feel of the blog, and access to hundreds, maybe thousands of useful plugins. I’ve just started to play with these plugins, but you’ll notice that I’ve already replaced the long list of tags in the right column with an easier to use tag cloud. I’d been trying for ages to do that with a Blogger hack, but it turns out the process is as simple as pressing a button or two with WordPress.
Anyway, the transition was a bit more complicated than I’d hoped, because I really wanted to make sure I could preserve the URL/permalink structure. Otherwise any links on other websites to older Liliputing posts would be dead. And since I use Disqus for comments, I would have lost all of the site’s comment history if I changed the URL structure. But while it took me about 14 hours to get everything figured out, now I’ve gathered all of the most useful resources I’ve found for switching from Blogger to WordPress in one place. So if you’re thinking of making the same jump, I hope that my little article can save you 10 or 12 hours.
Is the transfer flawless, or do we have to edit a couple of things?
I would be wary of using Disqus. You loose not only your control over comment content – a key asset for any blog – you also have Disqus being indexed by Google independent of your site, thereby diluting your content uniqueness and page rank.
WP has great comment plugins that would much better than Disqus (like subscribe to comments) and you get to keep control over content.
Interesting, thanks! I’ve been considering this move myself.