Import Blogger Posts & Comments to WordPress Easily

Its easy to import Blogger Posts and Comments to WordPress! After my recent WordPress move, many users emailed me to ask me how simple (or difficult) it was to move posts and comments from Blogger to WordPress…

It was as simple as possible I would say. I understand you have already installed the latest WordPress version 2 in the directory or root where you want it. See these official installation instructions. I installed the latest version WordPress 2.0.2 as a fresh install (In fact my Dreamhost webhosting did a one click WordPress install with MySQL database creation in a few minutes).

I tried their wiki instructions, but they were not correct. Other resources explained tips for importing into WordPress 1.5, where the blogger import script was not present and there were different tricks for importing posts and comments.

Settings in Blogger

I just ensured that some settings were inspired from different feedbacks I read elsewhere. Before doing anything, back up your Blogger blog first.

Click Formatting and change the Timestamp Format to be mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss AM/PM (the first choice in the dropdown menu).
Click Archiving and set Archive Frequency to ‘monthly’
These settings are already set in Blogger by default. I already had these settings in my blog anyway, so effectively I made no change my Blogger settings.

Settings in WordPress

Login into WordPress. Go to Import. Click on Blogger – “Import posts and comments from a Blogger account”. Fill in your blogger username and password. It will list all your blogger blogs as you see on the Blogger dashboard. Click on the blog you want to move to WordPress. And the Import will start automatically. Time taken will depend on how large your blog is. It took me a 2-3 minutes for a 1000 posts.

Remember, do not stop, reload or restart while the process is going on. It seems at times that the importing process is stuck, but it is continuing in the background. After all is done, it will tell you it is done and you can ‘Move on”…

If for some reason things get stuck, you can “reset the importer”.
View your new WordPress blog manage and see all your posts and comments are imported.

If you install WordPress in a subdirectory instead of the root of your domain, read all about hosting WordPress in an alternative directory.

Importing Bugs

- Several posts lost their formatting like text in bold, italics etc…
- The posts which had codes like javascript, html tags etc were lost these codes.
- Iframes inserted inside posts dissappeared. e.g. all those Amazon ads are displayed via iframes codes and they were gone.
- Of course all your customizations to the Blogger template need to be done again to the WordPress template now.
- Also read how to prevent errors by unclosed tags in WordPress Visual Text Editor.

Note: This post just gives my experience of importing from Blogger to WordPress. Always back up your Blogger blog before doing this. I do not take any responsibilty if this does not work for you or causes errors in your blogs.

All I can say it could not have been more easier. Nothing was affected in any way on my Blogger blog. And all posts and comments are on WordPress.