Problems and Solutions after Moving from Blogger to WordPress

Have you moved your blog from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress? Congratulations! you have made the right decision. Blogger platform is good but the self-hosted WordPress site gives you the complete hold on your website which is not possible with freely hosted blog on Blogger. Plus Blogger is quite limited for administrative use and does not allow the root access to core files of website. While with WordPress and the ease of cPanel, Plesk and other hosting control panels, you get the root privileges to customize your website the way you want. Moreover, if you ever need, you can easily move all your WordPress powered websites or blogs to a totally new host in less time and without damaging their rankings in SERP or losing any backlinks. Whereas, if you decide to move a Blogger hosted website to self hosted WordPress platform or you have already done that, you should get ready to face some troubles in the beginning.

Few years ago we moved this site from Blogger to WordPress and initially we faced some problem with internal links, permalinks of posts, appearance of images and text formatting. We eventually fixed all the problems but it took a lot of time and patience. We did use some plugins and those are still running to this date to not break the site. For example we did not like the Blogger post link structure that included date and .html at the end. We installed a plugin “Custom Permalinks” to customize permalinks for new posts by keeping old posts URLs intact. We did not want any unwanted redirection because that really affect the page loading speed and burden your server.

Moving from Blogger to WordPress is quite easier now because tools are provided with the WordPress software to facilitate the users. Blogger Importer is a plugin developed by WordPress developers which is used for importing blogs from Blogger. This is an easy to use automated plugin which can be used by anyone who is willing to switch from Blogger to WordPress hosting. As I mentioned earlier, certain kinds of problems can arise after making the switch. But the good news is, all those issues can be fixed and website owners or admins can do that by themselves. Below here, I have provided solutions to almost all problems that arise after making the switch.

Problem during Import Process
Lets begin with this. Sometimes or I should say most of the times while import process is running, Blogger Importer tool decides to give up importing and take some rest. This is the serious issue which worries the site owners what to do then. Fortunately, if this happens, refreshing or restarting the process helps Blogger Importer tool resume its job. Don’t worry, the files which have been imported already won’t be duplicated if you do that. Instead this tool will import only those files which were left undone. On a side note, the plugin developers should fix this issue to make the whole import process smoother.

Post Formatting Issue
Every blog writer formats the post to make it appear good to readers by using different fonts, font sizes and adding line breaks where required. After moving the blog to WordPress, check individual posts whether they are appearing correctly. If you see any odd appearance, fix that by editing the post. You can use &nbsp; or <br> tag to insert line breaks if lines or paragraphs have joined together. If fonts or fonts sizes appear poorly, you can also fix that easily. For all such work, you need to utilize Post Editor especially its “Text” editor to fix the problems by editing HTML. You can also try fixing such issues through “Visual” editor. But if it does not work out well for you then you can use “Text” editor. Using text editor requires some understanding of how different HTML codes work.

Problem with Images
Blog owners publish images in different sizes and at different locations to fit the article requirements. After making a switch from Blogger, images might appear inappropriate on WordPress hosted blog. The major problems which might arise are blurred images or images exceeding the space. You need to re-edit the posts to fix problems with images. Republishing the same images from Media library with necessary adjustments will also do the job. If your WordPress theme allows, you may also fix the errors with images through editing the stylesheet (style.css) or post template (single.php).

Custom Permalinks
If you have made permalinks appear the same as they were appearing on Blogger, you will not lose any traffic or backlinks. But now, you are stuck with the same old permalink structure which you were using previously on Blogger. If you try to alter permalinks structure from WordPress settings, that will change links for all the imported posts resulting in 404 errors and immediate loss of traffic and backlinks. The best bet is, leave that old permalink structure for old posts and use new structure for new posts. To change the permalink structure for new posts only, you can install this plugin “Custom Permalinks” or any other of your choice. Now, you will get the opportunity to publish new post with only post name or category name included after domain name in the permalink. You can also manually add date or anything in permalink as required.

Broken Internal Links
Internal links are important as they help interlink blog posts resulting into increase in users engagement and increase in pageviews. Internal links are also necessary for better SEO because search engines like Google give high importance to internal links. Unfortunately, all internal links get broken once your blog has moved and hosted on WordPress. If your website is huge with several hundreds posts, you may install a plugin which will automatically fix the broken links or some other plugin which can collect all broken internal links from complete website and present it to you so you could manually fix them. Personally, I will go with manual option as automated process does not guarantee whether users will land on correct pages. Redirection also increase page loading speed as I mentioned above. I shall recommend this plugin “Redirection” to fix broken internal links. Another option is to edit every single post and correct the links but that will be a lot of work.

404 Errors
If you have the habit of customizing permalinks slugs for better SEO, you may find out in Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) that your blog is getting 404 errors after moving from Blogger. These errors appear when conflict between permalink slug and post title happen on WordPress. You can fix all those 404 errors by manually adding 301 redirect. You can individually pick broken links from Search Console to redirect them or you can use the same “Redirection” plugin which I have mentioned above for fixing ‘Broken Internal Links’. This plugin is capable of recording all 404 errors so you could add redirection to broken links. Once added, 404 errors will be resolved.

Previously if your site was hosted with .blogspot.com extension, your users who have bookmarked your old sub-domain name will be shown a redirection page. They can still access your site with new domain name by clicking on Yes but in Search Console, your old sub domain name will show 404 errors. Add your new domain name in Search Console to let Google know that that is your website’s new domain name now. Eventually your WordPress site with new domain name will get recognized and start seeing improvements in SERP if it lost the ranking after migration. Also note that your personal domain name even if the name is same (example.com vs example.blogspot.com) will be treated as new domain and you might temporarily lose some or all organic traffic. But it will recover eventually when search engines find out that your site has moved to new domain name.

Sitemap
Adding Blogger hosted Blog sitemap to Google or Bing Webmasters Tools is quite easy and that requires just the submission of atom XML feed link. Unfortunately, on WordPress, that is not quite straight forward. To submit a Sitemap of WordPress powered website, you need to install Jetpack, Google XML Sitemaps or any third party plugin. Such plugins generate XML sitemap for search engines. If you have already started using Yoast SEO plugin on your newly moved site that also has got built-in sitemap feature which you can utilize. Please note that do not install more than one Sitemap plugin at a time as that might cause conflict between the two sitemaps with same URLs.

Feeds
Previously Feedburner was chiefly used by bloggers and website owners to keep track of all feed subscribers and bookmarks. Feed link (Atom) for Blogger blogs is different from WordPress blogs. So, after moving blog on WordPress, you would definitely lose previous subscribers and all feed information in Feedburner if new feed link appeared different from previous one. To fix that problem, you could redirect old feed subscribers to new address by using “Redirection” plugin.

Note: So, these are the problems that appear when you make a switch from Blogger to WordPress. Majority of these problems arise due to the difference between how Blogger works and how WordPress handles your posts. So you are left with installing plugins or manually fixing the problems. There is no need to panic because if I could do it when I was a newbie couple of years ago you can also.