Migrating Your Blog to Wordpress

A Short Tutorial

I'd been thinking for a while about moving my blog over to Wordpress as a step towards getting my own domain and having a more professional-looking site. But I worried about losing my posts, comments, and tags. It would have taken days to migrate the posts one-by-one. And I certainly didn't want to start with a blank slate.

But a fellow-blogger encouraged me to see if it'd really be that hard. Turns out the move was easier than I expected. In fact, migrating my blog took all of 5-10 minutes. I'll outline the steps here, along with some more time-consuming steps to take with widgets, feeds, and the like.

Step 1 - Create a Wordpress account and set up the basic blog.

Pretty self-explanatory. Go to Wordpress. Try to get a name as similar to your original one as possible. Preferably from "myawesomeblog.blogspot.com" to "myawesomeblog.wordpress.com." If you want to go straight to your own domain (which costs $15/year and has some extra perks), try to get "myawesomeblog.com."

You don't want people to think this is an entirely new blog. You want them to recognize you. Because even if your old posts are transferred, they might not recognize your new face.

Step 2 - Import everything.

Now that you've got your basic blog, go to My Dashboard and click Manage then Import. You can import from Blogger, Livejournal, Moveable Type, Typepad, and another Wordpress blog. I had Blogger.

Just follow the instructions. They made it insanely easy and explain it well. You'll have to log into your blog through their screen to allow the migration and then just click a couple buttons.

Once you're done, go to your new home page and see if they migrated right. If not, contact tech support because I can't help you on this. If it worked-congrats, you've migrated. Read on for suggestions on how to get your new blog up and running.

Step 3 - Announce your move.

Always important to let your readers know what's up. Leave a short post with a link to your new blog and explain that you'll be posting there from now on and hope they'll join you. It might also be a good idea to post on your new blog that you've just moved here and it's still under construction.