How to migrate from Blogger to WordPress (without losing traffic)

01Why move off Blogger at all

Blogger is free, fast, and run by Google, and for a hobby blog that's a perfectly fine place to live. But the moment your blog starts to matter — to your business, your name, or your income — Blogger's limits stop being quirks and start being walls. The core problem is simple: you don't own it.

We think about this as owned versus rented. A WordPress site on your own hosting and domain is property you control. A Blogger blog is space you're borrowing from Google, on terms Google sets and can change. That difference shapes almost everything below.

What you actually gain

• Ownership. Your content lives on hosting you pay for, under a domain you own — not on a platform that can suspend or sunset the product. Google has retired plenty of products before.
• Flexibility. WordPress runs roughly half the web because you can bend it to almost anything — a shop, a membership, a portfolio, a real business site — instead of a blog Google decided the shape of.
• Themes. Blogger's theme selection is thin and dated. WordPress has thousands of modern, fast, responsive themes, and you change your whole look from a menu.
• Monetization. You're free to run any ad network, affiliate setup, email capture, or store you want, with full control of the page — not just the options Blogger surfaces.
• Professionalism. A blog at yoursite.com on WordPress simply reads as more serious than one at yourname.blogspot.com, to readers and to clients alike.

None of this means Blogger is bad. It means you've outgrown a rented room and it's time to move into a place you own — and the move is far more doable than most bloggers fear.

02What actually migrates

Here's the good news that makes this whole project less scary than the HTML-to-WordPress version: Blogger and WordPress were built to talk to each other. Blogger has a one-click export, and WordPress ships with a Blogger importer designed to read exactly that file.

On the Blogger side, Settings has a "Back up content" option that downloads your entire blog — every post and every comment — as a single XML file. That file is the package you carry across. Nothing is locked in; you can take your words with you.

On the WordPress side, Tools, Import, Blogger reads that XML and recreates your posts, your post dates, your categories or labels, and your comments inside WordPress. For a normal text-and-images blog, the bulk of your content lands in one operation.

What transfers cleanly, and what needs a check

• Posts and pages come across with their text, headings, and dates intact.
• Comments transfer, attached to the right posts — a relief if your blog has years of discussion.
• Labels become WordPress categories or tags, so your topic structure survives.
• Images usually import, but they often still point at Google's servers. You'll want to pull them into your own media library so nothing breaks when the old blog goes away — more on that below.
• Your theme and layout do not transfer. You pick a fresh WordPress theme, which is an upgrade, not a loss.

So the import itself is the easy part. The work that earns its keep is everything around it — images, links, and the redirects that protect your search traffic.

03The plan, start to finish

Before we go deep on the steps that trip people up, here's the whole shape of the move. Do it in this order and nothing surprises you halfway through.

• Get WordPress hosting and install WordPress. Most hosts install it in one click; many will set it up for you.
• Pick a theme that suits your blog, since the old Blogger look doesn't come across.
• Export from Blogger (Settings, Back up content) and import into WordPress (Tools, Import, Blogger).
• Fix images and internal links so nothing still points back at the old blogspot address.
• Set up redirects from your old Blogger URLs to the new ones — the step that protects your rankings.
• Add the essentials — an SEO plugin, your analytics, a contact form — then point your domain at WordPress.

The two steps bloggers skip are fixing images and setting redirects, and those are exactly the two that decide whether Google barely notices the move or quietly drops you for months. They each get their own section below.

04Importing from Blogger

With hosting in place and WordPress installed, the import is genuinely a few clicks. The order matters, though: export from Blogger first so you're working with a complete, current snapshot of the blog.

In Blogger, go to Settings, scroll to Manage Blog, and choose Back up content. That downloads one XML file containing every post and comment. Keep that file safe — it's your whole blog in one place, and a backup you'll be glad to have regardless.

In WordPress, go to Tools, Import, find Blogger in the list, and install its importer. Upload the XML file, and WordPress will work through your posts, dates, comments, and labels. On the way it asks you to assign an author, which just attaches the imported posts to your WordPress user.

When it finishes, open a handful of posts and read them. Check that text, headings, and comments look right before you move on. Catching a formatting quirk now, on a fresh import, is far easier than discovering it after launch.

05Fixing images and links

The most common gotcha after a Blogger import is images that still load from Google's servers. They look fine today because the old blog still exists — but the day you retire it or it changes, those images can vanish from your new site. You want every image living in your own media library.

The non-developer fix is an import-images plugin (the "Import External Images" type) that scans your posts, finds images hosted elsewhere, downloads them into your WordPress media library, and rewrites the links to point locally. It does in one pass what would be hours of manual saving and re-uploading.

• Pull external images local with an import-images plugin, then spot-check a few posts to confirm they now load from your own media library.
• Fix internal links that still point at yourblog.blogspot.com — a search-and-replace plugin can repoint them to your new domain in bulk.
• Recheck after you set redirects, since redirects will catch most stragglers, but clean internal links are better than relying on a redirect for every click.

This step feels minor and isn't. Broken images and links pointing back at the dead blog are the most visible way a migration looks botched, and they're entirely avoidable with a plugin and ten minutes of checking.

06The critical SEO step: redirects

This is the part that protects whatever Google traffic your blog has earned. Blogger and WordPress format URLs differently, so even with identical post titles, your addresses change. A Blogger post sits at something like /2024/03/my-post.html, while WordPress, by default, uses a clean /my-post/. If nothing bridges that gap, every link and ranking pointing at the old address leaks away.

A redirect tells browsers and Google that a page has permanently moved, and passes the old page's ranking value to the new one. You want a 301 (permanent) redirect from each old Blogger URL to its matching WordPress URL. How you do it depends on which domain your old blog uses.

If you used a custom domain on Blogger

This is the easier case. Because your domain just moves from pointing at Blogger to pointing at WordPress, you keep control of it. A redirect plugin (Redirection is the common free one) lets you map old URL patterns to new ones, and there are Blogger-to-WordPress redirect plugins built specifically to translate the /year/month/post.html shape into clean URLs automatically.

If you used a free blogspot.com address

You can't add a plugin to Blogger, but you can still redirect. Blogger lets you swap in a custom theme template, and the trick is to install a redirect template on the old blog: a small piece of template code whose only job is to send each visitor — and Googlebot — from the old blogspot URL to the matching post on your new domain.

• Set the redirect template on the Blogger blog so each old post forwards to its new home, and the blog homepage forwards to your new homepage.
• Add a canonical pointing to the new domain so search engines treat your WordPress version as the original, not a duplicate.
• Use 301 (permanent) intent, mapping each old post to its closest match — never blanket-forward everything to the homepage, which Google reads as a soft 404.
• Keep the old blog live while the redirects do their work; deleting it removes the very thing doing the forwarding.

Redirects feel like the boring chore at the end. They are the single most valuable hour in the whole migration if your blog has any search traffic worth keeping — skip them and you start your new site from zero.

07Picking a theme

Your Blogger layout doesn't come across, and that's a feature, not a bug — it's your chance to leave a dated template behind. The mistake to avoid is the mirror image of the one HTML migrators make: don't agonize over recreating your old Blogger look exactly. Pick a clean modern theme that fits your blog and move on.

Name what actually matters about your current blog — roughly the layout, your colors, your logo, the general feel — then choose a lightweight theme that already gets you most of the way there. You set colors and your logo in the theme settings, and you're 80% of "it looks like us" in minutes.

• Favor lightweight, fast themes so your new site loads as quickly as Blogger did — speed is one thing Blogger does well, so don't give it up to a bloated theme.
• Match structure, not pixels. A blog is a header, a menu, posts, and a sidebar; almost any clean blog theme covers that.
• Prefer themes built on the block editor or a portable builder so you're not locked in if you switch themes again later.
• Check it on a phone, since that's where most of your readers actually are.

A close-enough theme you can maintain beats a fussy clone of a Blogger template you were already tired of. The point right now is getting your content into a system you control and can grow.

08Preserving the rest of your SEO

Redirects do the heavy lifting, but a few smaller settings round out a clean transition. Get these right and most blogs see no lasting drop after a Blogger move.

• Set your permalink structure first, under Settings, Permalinks, so your new URLs are final before you build redirects against them.
• Install one SEO plugin (Yoast or Rank Math) to manage titles, meta descriptions, and your sitemap — the things Blogger handled invisibly.
• Submit your new sitemap in Google Search Console the day you go live, and add the new domain as a property if it isn't one already.
• Watch Search Console for 404s for a couple of weeks and add any redirects you missed.
• Keep the old blog and its redirects in place for a good while, not just a few days, so search engines fully transfer the signals.

Google cares about the address and the content, not whether a post is served by Blogger or WordPress. Keep the content the same, redirect the addresses, and the move is something it absorbs rather than punishes.

09The going-live checklist

Going live is a deliberate step. Before you point your domain at the new WordPress site, walk this list — ideally on a staging copy, which most managed hosts include free — so problems get caught before readers see them.

• Every post and page imported and reads correctly, with comments attached.
• All images load from your own media library, with nothing still pulling from Google's servers.
• Internal links point at the new domain, not at yourblog.blogspot.com.
• Your permalink structure is set and final, so URLs won't shift again after launch.
• Redirects are in place — the plugin (custom domain) or the redirect template plus canonical (blogspot address).
• Your SEO plugin has titles, descriptions, and a working sitemap ready to submit.
• Analytics is connected to the new site so you don't go blind on traffic mid-move.
• The site is tested on a phone, where most of your readers will land.
• After going live, submit the new sitemap in Search Console and watch for 404s.

When that list is green, point your domain at WordPress and let the redirects carry your readers across. Keep your Blogger export file and the old blog itself around for a while — cheap insurance if you spot something you missed.

10FAQ

Will I lose my comments when I move from Blogger?

No. Blogger's export includes comments, and WordPress's Blogger importer reattaches them to the right posts. Open a few busy posts after importing to confirm the comments came through — they almost always do for standard Blogger comments.

Will moving to WordPress hurt my Google rankings?

Only if you change URLs without redirecting them. Blogger and WordPress format addresses differently, so redirects are essential, not optional. Map each old URL to its new one with 301 redirects and most blogs see no lasting drop — Google cares about the address and content, not the platform.

Can I redirect a free blogspot.com address?

Yes. You can't install a plugin on Blogger, but you can swap in a redirect template that forwards each old post to its new home and adds a canonical pointing at your new domain. Keep the old blog live so the template keeps doing its job.

Do I need to know any code?

Barely. The export, import, image fix, and most redirects are clicks and plugins. The one code-like moment is pasting a redirect template into a blogspot blog, and that's copy-paste, not programming. If even that feels like too much, a managed host's setup team can handle it.

How long does a Blogger-to-WordPress move take?

A typical blog is a focused day: an hour or two for hosting and a theme, a quick export and import, an hour fixing images and links, and an hour on redirects. Very large blogs scale up mostly in the checking, not the importing.

This is general, experience-based guidance from running a theme shop, not financial or professional advice for your specific blog. When a blog carries real revenue or traffic you can't afford to lose, treat that as the signal to get a professional or your host's migration team involved.