How to move from Blogger to WordPress

If you already have an existing blog on Blogger or Blogspot, you’ll be glad to know that you can easily import posts and images to your new WordPress site. Here we’ll walk you through the steps to move a Blogger blog to WordPress.

We wrote this post, assuming that our readers have a WordPress website set up. If you don’t, however, read How to Start a WordPress Site, first post. Then come back here to learn how to import your Blogger or Blogspot content to WordPress.

First export your existing content from Blogger

1. Sign into your Blogger or Blogspot account.
2. In your dashboard, go to Settings → Other.
3. Download an XML file of your blog’s content. To do that, click Back Up Content, under Import & Back Up, then click Save to your computer. NOTE: Make a mental note of where you’re putting this file on your computer. You need it when you get to step 5 below.

Then import your Blogger blog content to your WordPress site

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard … yourdomain.ca/wp-admin.
2. Go to Tools → Import.
3. Select Install Now, underneath Blogger, to install the Blogger importer plugin to import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags from an XML file.
4. Click Run Importer underneath Blogger.
5. Click Choose File and select the XML file that you saved in step 3 above.
6. Click Upload file and import.
7. You will first be asked to map the authors in this export file to users on the blog. For each author, you may choose to map to an existing user on the blog or to create a new user.

The Blogger importer will not import images to the WordPress media library. Blog images may appear in the posts but the physical image file source is still being pulled in from Blogger.

Now Upload Images from Blogger into your WordPress media library

Now you need to import your images in your WordPress media library. You can manually add them to the library and to the blog posts, or you can use a plugin that does this for you.

We recommend that you use the plugin, Auto Upload Images.

1. On your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New and install the Auto Upload Images plugin. Activate the plugin
2. Go to Settings → Media and make a note of what your Max Width and Height are for Large images
3. Now head to Settings → Auto Upload Images and change Image Size: Max Width and Height to match the Media library dimensions set for Large images
4. Click Save Changes
5. Go to a post in your WordPress blog you want to import images from.
6. Make no changes and Click Update

Now the images for the posts should be imported to your WordPress media library!

If the images do not appear in your posts and are showing broken image icons,  like   ; you will need to delete the broken image and add the image from your media library—which should already be in your Media Library.

If the images are still showing broken image icons, you will have to manually add the image to your Library:

1. Go to the post in Blogger.
2. Right-click and save the image to your computer.
3. Go to the post in WordPress.
4. Click Add Media.
5. Find the image that you just saved on your computer and upload it your post.

Unfortunately, the Auto Upload Images plugin doesn’t have a way to scan your blog—images are imported and blogger URLs are replaced with WordPress media library URLS when a post is updated. You will need to go through and update every imported post individually.

Clean up unwanted Blogger code

You might also have to delete unwanted tables, spans, and divs in the text editor that get imported from blogger. To do this you’ll want to switch from the visual editor to the text editor. You’ll need to understand basic HTML for this step.

Review your imported Categories & Tags

When you bring over your posts you’ll also import categories and tags. Now, before Google indexes your site, review them and clean them up. You can learn more about blog categories and tags here.

Need help Moving from Blogger to WordPress?

Our best recommendation is that you take our in-person 2-day WordPress intensive workshop. We will walk you through all the steps to setup your own WordPress site and you can copy and paste from your Wix site as you learn.