FTP publishing on Blogger to WordPress: Migration guide

FTP publlishing on Blogger to WordPress migration – Simple and step by step guide

Blogger is closing its FTP publishing soon. Those who want to stay with Blogger custom domain or Blogspot can wait for their Migration tool. I recently migrated a client’s site from Blogger FTP publishing to WordPress and it was a learning experience. Here is a brief migration guide:

1. Create a beta site in WordPress. ( http://example.com/beta/ )

2. WordPress import will not work with FTP publishing on Blogger. So, switch FTP publishing to some Blogspot domain name for a moment. Don’t worry. Your blog will be safe as all the FTP files still remain on your server and your site will be accessible.

3. Import your Blogger comments and posts from the Blogspot domain to beta WordPress site.

4. Follow the steps in http://devilsworkshop.org/moving-from-blogger-to-wordpress-maintaining-permalinks-traffic-seo/ to preserve Blogger permalinks and therefore your PageRank.

5. Export the posts and comments from WordPress beta site.

6. Access your site through FTP and rename index.html to index-backup.html . You will have folders like 07, 08 , 09 etc., These are yearly folders containing the FTP published files. Rename all these yearly folders to 07-backup, 08-backup etc.,

7. Install WordPress in the directory where you published Blogger by FTP.

8. Import the WordPress XML file from beta site.

All Done. Have Fun

P. S . 1. If you have trouble accessing homepage after migration, check your .htaccess and remove any line regarding index.html

P.S. 2. Haloscan, a commenting service, is also shutting down. If you have your Haloscan comments tied to your FTP Blogger, follow the steps in

http://justinsomnia.org/2007/11/importing-haloscan-comments-into-wordpress-23-from-blogger/