How to Migrate Your Blogger Site to WordPress (Updated for 2026)

If you started blogging in the 2000s or early 2010s, there’s a good chance your first site lived on Blogger.

It was free, simple, and backed by Google. You didn’t need to know what hosting meant or how to install anything. You just picked a template, wrote some posts, and hit publish.

For many people, Blogger was perfect for that exact moment in time.

But at some point, you probably wanted a sleeker design and realized Blogger’s templates all look dated. Maybe you tried adding a feature (like a contact form) and discovered that Blogger’s gadgets haven’t been updated since 2012.

That’s when most people start looking at WordPress.

It’s the standard upgrade path for anyone who’s serious about their content. On WordPress.org, you get full design control, unlimited plugins for functionality, and actual ownership of your work instead of renting space on Google’s servers.

The catch? You have to move everything over without breaking your links, losing your images, or tanking your Google rankings.

In this post, I’ll show you how to properly move your Blogger site to WordPress!

Here are the key takeaways:

• You’ll need web hosting and a domain to run self-hosted WordPress (Bluehost starts around $2.99/month)
• Export your Blogger content using RSS feeds; Google now delivers Blogger backups through Google Takeout as a .zip with a feed.atom file, which the WordPress Blogger importer can’t read
• Match Blogger’s permalink structure exactly (/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html) to preserve SEO
• Set up redirects from your old Blogger URL to your new WordPress site so visitors and search engines find you
• Manually rebuild sidebar widgets and redirect your RSS feed subscribers
• Use Duplicator to back up your site before the migration so you can revert to a clean WordPress installation in case something breaks

Table of Contents

Why Move from Blogger to WordPress?

The biggest reason to leave Blogger is that you don’t actually own anything. Google owns the platform and the servers.

If they decide your site violates their terms (even by mistake), they can suspend it. You could wake up one day and your blog is just gone.

On WordPress, you own the files and the database. If your host goes down, you can move to another one. Nobody can delete years of your work.

Then there’s the design problem.

Blogger templates are rigid. You get a handful of pre-built layouts that all look like they were designed in 2008 (because most of them were). If you want to change something specific—like moving your sidebar or adjusting your header—you’re editing raw HTML and XML.

WordPress themes are built for flexibility. You can swap your entire design in five minutes without touching code. The Site Editor or a theme builder plugin lets you drag things around visually. You can customize your site until it looks just right.

Functionality is where the gap gets even wider.

Blogger has “gadgets.” They’re clunky, limited, and most of them haven’t been updated in over a decade.

WordPress has plugins to customize your site. There are over 60,000 free ones available for you to download.

You can add e-commerce, membership sites, booking systems, SEO tools, advanced forms—basically anything. If you can think of a feature, there’s a plugin for it.

And if you’re trying to make money from your site, WordPress opens doors that Blogger can’t.

Blogger limits you to AdSense. WordPress lets you sell products, run online courses, set up paid memberships, or build an entire store. You’re not waiting for Google to approve your monetization strategy.

How to Migrate Your Blogger Site to WordPress

In a website migration, you’re not just copy-pasting text into new posts. You want to preserve your content, move your images, and keep your URLs intact, so your Google rankings don’t disappear overnight.

Here’s how to move from Blogger to WordPress:

• Step 1: Set Up Your WordPress Site: Get web hosting (like Bluehost), install WordPress, and create your first backup using Duplicator before importing anything.
• Step 2: Export Your Blogger Content and Import It: Download your Blogger backup from Google Takeout, then upload its feed.atom file with the free BtW Importer plugin.
• Step 3: Set Up Permalinks: Change your WordPress permalink structure to match Blogger’s exact URL format so all your old links still work.
• Step 4: Move Other Blogger Content to WordPress: Manually rebuild your sidebar widgets and redirect your RSS feed subscribers to your new WordPress feed.
• Step 5: Set Up Redirects from Blogger to WordPress: Point your custom domain to your new host, or add redirect code to your Blogger theme, so visitors and Google land on your new site.

Step 1: Set Up Your WordPress Site

Before you can move anything to WordPress, you need to set up your new site.

WordPress.org (the self-hosted version we’re talking about) doesn’t work like Blogger. You can’t just sign up and start writing. You need web hosting—basically, you’re renting server space from a company that keeps your site online 24/7.

Bluehost is a solid choice here. It’s officially recommended by WordPress, and the plans start around $2.99/month. They’ll also install WordPress for you automatically when you sign up.

When you register for hosting, you’ll need to choose a domain name. This is your site’s address (like yoursite.com).

If you already own a domain from your Blogger days, you can point it to your new host. If not, most hosting companies let you register one during signup (usually free for the first year).

Once you’ve signed up and your host has installed WordPress, you’ll get login credentials to access your WordPress dashboard.

Before you do anything else, I recommend installing the Duplicator plugin.

Why right now, before doing anything else? Because you want a clean backup of your fresh WordPress install.

If something goes wrong during the import (duplicate posts, broken formatting, whatever), you can roll back to this clean slate instantly instead of manually deleting hundreds of posts.

Duplicator lets you snapshot the site in its current state, and you’ll thank yourself later if you need to restore it.

Step 2: Export Your Blogger Content and Import It

You used to be able to download a backup of your Blogger site and import it into WordPress. However, Google moved Blogger backups into Google Takeout. You now get a .zip file containing a feed.atom file, and the WordPress Blogger importer can’t read it.

Luckily, newer import plugins can. Here’s how to get your content out of Blogger and into WordPress.

First, open Blogger and go to Settings » Manage blog » Back up content. Click Download.

This opens Google Takeout, where you can create the export and download it as a .zip file. Large blogs may be split across several .zip files.

Once it’s ready, you’ll get an email with a download link.

Unzip the download and open Takeout » Blogger » Blogs » [your blog name]. The file you need is feed.atom. Keep the Albums folder too, since it holds every image you uploaded to Blogger.

Then, install the free BtW Importer plugin and upload your feed.atom file. It imports your posts and pages, downloads your Google-hosted images into the Media Library, sets featured images, and automatically adds 301 redirects from your old Blogger post URLs to the new ones.

BtW Importer’s feature list doesn’t include comments. If you need them, Blogger Importer Extended imports comments too, but its free version stops at 20 posts and pages.

Step 3: Set Up Permalinks

Blogger and WordPress use different post URL structures by default:

• Blogger: yourblog.blogspot.com/2026/12/post-name.html
• WordPress: yoursite.com/post-name/

WordPress drops the date and the .html extension. If you don’t update your permalinks, every link you’ve ever shared, every backlink someone else has made to your content, every URL Google has indexed—all of them break.

You need to match Blogger’s URL structure exactly.

Go to Settings » Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard.

You’ll see a few preset options. Scroll down to Custom Structure and select it.

In the text field, enter this:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

Save it.

Now your WordPress URLs will match the format Blogger used. Same year, month, post name, and .html ending.

Step 4: Move Other Blogger Content to WordPress

There’s other content on your Blogger site that didn’t come over automatically in the RSS feed import.

You won’t have sidebars on your new site. Blogger calls them gadgets, while WordPress calls them widgets or blocks, but either way, you’re rebuilding them from scratch.

Go to Appearance » Widgets (or Appearance » Editor if you’re using a block theme). Add whatever you had before, like social media links, recent posts, or search bars.

This part can be tedious, but it’s also a chance to clean house. If you had a gadget you never really used, just skip it.

Your RSS feed is another thing to handle. If people subscribed to your Blogger feed (usually yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default), you need to redirect them to your new WordPress feed (yoursite.com/feed/).

You can do this in Blogger. Go to Settings » Site feed. Click on Post feed redirect URL.

In the pop-up, add your WordPress feed URL, which looks like this: http://example.com/feed

Step 5: Set Up Redirects from Blogger to WordPress

You’ve matched your URLs, but people are still going to visit your old Blogger address. You need to send them, and Google, to your new site automatically.

How you do that depends on your old address.

If your Blogger blog used a custom domain (like yourblog.com), this is the easy case. Point that domain’s DNS to your new host. Since your permalinks already match Blogger’s format, your old URLs will load the same posts on WordPress.

If your blog lives on blogspot.com, you can’t install a redirect plugin there, because Google controls the server. Instead, the redirect happens in two places:

1. In Blogger, back up your current theme under Theme, then replace it with redirect code that sends each visitor to the matching page on your new site.
2. On WordPress, set up 301 redirects from each old Blogger path to its new post. BtW Importer adds these automatically for posts that used Blogger’s standard /year/month/post-name.html format.

Watch out for Blogger’s mobile URLs, too. Blogger adds ?m=1 to links on phones, and those can show up as 404 errors on WordPress unless you redirect them.

Finally, add your new site to Google Search Console and submit your XML sitemap, so Google finds your posts at their new address quickly.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Move to a More Flexible Blog Platform

You own your content now. If you don’t like your host, you can move to one with better performance. If you want to add a feature, install a plugin.

That control comes with responsibility, though.

You need backups. Now that you’re learning WordPress, you’re going to break things. Trust me, I’ve triggered plugin conflicts, bad updates, and other critical errors.

That’s where Duplicator Pro comes in. This plugin automatically backs up your entire site to secure cloud storage (like Duplicator Cloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox) on a schedule you set. It will protect your site hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.

When (not if) something breaks, you won’t panic. You’ll restore the last backup with one click.

Try out Duplicator Pro today!

While you’re here, I think you’ll like these other WordPress resources:

• How to Move a Website to WordPress From Any Platform
• 11 WordPress Maintenance Tasks You Won’t Want to Forget
• How to Install WordPress (Beginner’s Guide)
• How to Back Up a WordPress Site
• WordPress Database Maintenance: What to Do Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly