How to Switch From Blogger to WordPress Without Losing Google Rankings

“Will I lose my Google rankings if I move from Blogger to WordPress?” That’s the first question we hear from anyone thinking about making the switch.

We get it. However, after helping many bloggers make this move, we can say with confidence that you can switch from Blogger to WordPress without losing your Google rankings.

In this guide, we’ll show you the exact steps we use, from exporting your Blogger blog to setting up the redirects that protect your search traffic.

WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org: What’s the Difference?

There are two types of WordPress, and this guide uses WordPress.org, also known as self-hosted WordPress. WordPress.com is a hosted service where you cannot install plugins on the free plan. You’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to unlock plugins and follow this tutorial.

For a full breakdown, see our comparison of WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to move from Blogger to WordPress while keeping your Google rankings and traffic. Here are the steps we’ll cover:

Step 1: Sign Up for WordPress Hosting

To get started with WordPress, you will need a domain name and web hosting. A domain name is your website’s address, and web hosting is where your website files live.

You can choose any WordPress hosting provider that you want, like Bluehost or Hostinger. Both are officially recommended WordPress hosting providers and offer a free domain name for the first year.

For this tutorial, we used Bluehost, which automatically installed WordPress when we signed up, so we were able to log into our new site right away.

Step 2: Export Your Blogger Blog

Now that your WordPress site is ready, the next step is to export your content from Blogger.

Log in to your Blogger account, pick your blog, and click Settings in the left menu. Scroll down to the ‘Manage blog’ section, click ‘Back up content’, and then click ‘Download’.

Blogger no longer downloads an XML file straight away. Instead, the Download button now opens Google Takeout, which is Google’s tool for downloading your data, with Blogger already selected.

Click ‘Next step’, keep the default settings, and click ‘Create export’.

Google will email you when the export is ready, which usually takes a few minutes for a small blog.

Click ‘Download archive’ in that email and save the .zip file to your computer.

Next, unzip the file. Open the Takeout folder, then Blogger, then Blogs, and then the folder with your blog’s name.

The file you need is called feed.atom. It holds your posts, pages, and comments.

If Takeout splits your export into more than one .zip file, check each one for a feed.atom file. You will import them one after another in the next step.

Note: Keep a copy of the whole archive in a safe place, like cloud storage or an external drive. It is your backup of the original blog. The Albums folder inside it holds every image you ever uploaded to Blogger, which we come back to in Step 6.

Step 3: Import Blogger to WordPress

With the feed.atom file on your computer, you can now import your content into WordPress.

WordPress comes with a default Blogger importer, available on the Tools » Import page in the admin area. However, that importer has been broken since July 2025. That is when Google moved Blogger backups into Google Takeout and changed the file format at the same time.

Luckily, there are alternative plugins you can use.

1. BtW Importer – This is the plugin we’ll be using in this tutorial. It imports posts, pages, images, and even set up redirects. The downside is that it doesn’t import comments.
2. Blogger Importer Extended – Imports posts, pages, images, and comments, but the free version is limited to 20 posts. You can use this if you have fewer posts or if you want to import comments.

First, install and activate the BtW Importer plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, click the new BtW Importer item in your WordPress admin menu. The page starts with a short list of things to know before you import.

Read it, then tick the ‘I’ve read and understood the information above’ box.

In Step 1, click the ‘Choose your Blogger export file’ button and select the feed.atom file. Then click the ‘Upload File’ button.

In Step 2, click the ‘Extract Data’ button. The plugin reads the file and counts your posts and pages.

Step 3 shows how many items it found. The ‘Advanced Options’ panel lets you keep the original Blogger author for each post, and it has an experimental option to convert the old Blogger HTML into WordPress blocks.

We recommend leaving that option unchecked for your first run, because you can always convert posts to blocks later in the editor.

Leave the batch size on ‘Recommended’ and click the ‘Start’ button.

The plugin imports your posts and pages, downloads every image hosted on Google’s servers into your media library, and rewrites the image links inside your posts to the new copies.

It also records the old Blogger address of each post, which we use for the redirects in Step 5.

A progress log shows each item as it comes over, and you will see a ‘Congratulations!’ message when it finishes.

You can now check your content under Posts » All Posts and Pages » All Pages. Blogger labels become WordPress categories, drafts stay drafts, and the first image in each post becomes its featured image.

Step 4: Setting Up Permalinks

Now that your posts are in WordPress, let’s talk about their web addresses. Permalinks is the WordPress term for the URL structure of your posts and pages.

Blogger post URLs look like this: https://yourblog.blogspot.com/2026/08/post-title.html.

The BtW Importer plugin saved the old address of every post and page in a redirect map. Whenever a request for an old address reaches your WordPress site, the plugin sends it to the matching new post.

So keep WordPress’s default setting. Go to Settings » Permalinks and check that you have the ‘Post name’ option selected.

This setting gives you clean, SEO-friendly URLs like yourblog.com/post-title/.

You can see the full list of old and new addresses under BtW Importer » Redirect Log. Every Blogger post and page should have a row here.

To test it, open one of the old addresses on your new domain, such as yourblog.com/2026/08/post-title.html. WordPress should send you straight to the new post.

In our test, the old post and page URLs all returned a 301 redirect to the right place.

This map only works for users that arrive at your WordPress domain. However, since your users and Google don’t know that you have moved, they will continue seeing your old Blogger blog until you finish Step 5.

Step 5: Set Up Redirects From Blogger to WordPress

Now that WordPress knows where every old address should go, it is time for the most important step of the whole migration, which is redirecting users and search engines like Google to your new WordPress site.

A redirect sends anyone who opens one of your old Blogger URLs to the same post on WordPress automatically.

It also sends a 301 status code, which is the code for a permanent redirect. This tells Google that the page has moved for good, so your rankings pass to the new address instead of starting from zero.

Blogger does not let you set up server redirects, so here is the workaround.

First, we add a small code snippet to your WordPress site. It receives the visitors that Blogger sends over, looks up the old address, and forwards them to the right post in WordPress.

Then, add a code snippet to your Blogger theme to send every visitor and search engine from your blogspot.com address to that snippet.

1. Add the Redirect Snippet to WordPress

We recommend adding the snippet with the free WPCode plugin, which is the safest way to add custom code to WordPress. For more details, see our guide on how to copy and paste code snippets in WordPress.

After installing WPCode, go to Code Snippets » + Add Snippet. Hover over ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ and click ‘Use snippet’.

Choose ‘PHP Snippet’ as the code type, give your snippet a name, and paste the following code:

add_action( 'template_redirect', 'wpb_blogger_b2w_redirect', 1 );

function wpb_blogger_b2w_redirect() {
	if ( empty( $_GET['b2w'] ) ) {
		return;
	}

	$old_path = wp_parse_url( esc_url_raw( wp_unslash( $_GET['b2w'] ) ), PHP_URL_PATH );
	$target   = home_url( '/' );

	if ( $old_path ) {
		$matches = get_posts( array(
			'post_type'           => array( 'post', 'page' ),
			'post_status'         => 'publish',
			'posts_per_page'      => 1,
			'ignore_sticky_posts' => true,
			'meta_key'            => '_old_permalink',
			'meta_value'          => $old_path,
		) );

		if ( $matches ) {
			$target = get_permalink( $matches[0] );
		}
	}

	wp_safe_redirect( $target, 301 );
	exit;
}

This code reads the old Blogger address that your Blogger theme will pass along, looks up the matching post or page that BtW Importer saved, and sends the visitor there with a 301 redirect. If nothing matches, it sends them to your homepage instead of a 404 error.

Below the code box, set the Insertion method to ‘Auto Insert’ and the Location to ‘Frontend Only’. Then switch the toggle at the top to Active and click the ‘Save Snippet’ button.

2. Replace Your Blogger Theme With the Redirect Code

Next, log in to your Blogger dashboard and go to the Theme page. Click the down arrow next to the ‘Customize’ button, and then select ‘Edit HTML’.

Blogger will now display the HTML code of your theme.

Before you delete anything, copy ALL of the existing Blogger theme HTML and save it to a text file on your computer as a backup.

Once you have backed up the original theme code, delete everything in the editor and paste the following code. Replace https://example.com with your new WordPress site’s address in all four places:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html b:version='2' class='v2' expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>
<head>
<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<link expr:href='&quot;https://example.com/?b2w=&quot; + data:blog.url' rel='canonical'/>
<meta expr:content='&quot;0;url=https://example.com/?b2w=&quot; + data:blog.url' http-equiv='refresh'/>
<script type='text/javascript'>
//<![CDATA[
window.location.replace('https://example.com/?b2w=' + encodeURIComponent(window.location.href));
//]]>
</script>
<b:skin><![CDATA[
body { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; text-align: center; padding: 40px; }
]]></b:skin>
</head>
<body>
<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog' version='2'>
<b:includable id='main'>
<p>This blog has moved. <a expr:href='&quot;https://example.com/?b2w=&quot; + data:blog.url'>Click here if you are not redirected.</a></p>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>
</b:section>
</body>
</html>

This theme code does three things. It tells search engines that each old page has a new canonical address, uses a meta refresh tag to send them to that page, and redirects human visitors with a small script.

All three point at the WordPress snippet from the previous step, which then forwards to the exact post.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button to store your changes.

Older Blogger themes also serve a separate mobile version of your blog, and that version ignores the code you just pasted.

To turn it off, click the same down arrow next to the ‘Customize’ button and select ‘Mobile settings’.

In the popup, choose the ‘Desktop’ option and click ‘Save’. If you don’t see ‘Mobile settings’, your theme is already responsive, and you can skip this.

Now test it. Open one of your old Blogger post URLs in a private browser window, and within a second you should land on the same post on your WordPress site.

3. Redirect Blogger’s ?m=1 Mobile URLs

When someone opens your Blogger blog on a phone, Blogger adds ?m=1 to the end of the address, and Google often indexes these mobile addresses alongside the normal ones.

In our tests, that small addition caused a real problem. WordPress uses m as its own parameter for date archives, so a request for yourblog.com/?m=1 or yourblog.com/post-title/?m=1 returns a 404 error page.

The fix is a second WPCode snippet that sends every ?m=1 and ?m=0 request to the clean URL with a 301 redirect. Create another PHP snippet in WPCode, just like you did above, and paste this code:

add_action( 'template_redirect', 'wpb_redirect_blogger_mobile_urls' );

function wpb_redirect_blogger_mobile_urls() {
	if ( ! isset( $_GET['m'] ) || ! in_array( $_GET['m'], array( '0', '1' ), true ) ) {
		return;
	}

	wp_safe_redirect( remove_query_arg( 'm' ), 301 );
	exit;
}

Scroll down a little and set the Location to ‘Frontend Only’, switch the snippet to Active, and click ‘Save Snippet’.

In our test, opening the homepage and a post URL with ?m=1 at the end both sent us straight to the clean URL.

Step 6: Moving Other Content From Blogger to WordPress

With your content moved and the redirects in place, it is time to check the pieces that need a manual touch. Below are five things to look at, and how to handle each one.

1. Pages

BtW Importer moves your Blogger pages, like About and Contact, into Pages » All Pages, and it redirects their old /p/ addresses too. Open each one to check the formatting, and add them to your WordPress theme’s navigation menus.

You might also want to check out our list of important pages every WordPress blog should have, so you don’t miss anything Blogger never had.

2. Widgets

Like Blogger, many WordPress themes use widgets to add content to your blog’s sidebar. To add them, visit the Appearance » Editor page for block themes and Appearance » Widgets page for classic themes.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to add and use widgets in WordPress.

If you are looking for a widget that WordPress does not have by default, then you likely need a plugin. WordPress has over 72,000 free plugins, so see our beginner’s guide on how to choose the right WordPress plugin.

3. RSS Feeds

People who follow your blog through RSS feeds will still be able to find your blog. However, they will not get any new content until you point the old feed to the new one.

To fix this, go to the Settings page in your Blogger dashboard. Scroll down to the ‘Site feed’ section and click ‘Post feed redirect URL’.

This will bring up a popup where you need to add the RSS feed URL of your WordPress website. Your WordPress feed URL will look like this:

http://example.com/feed

Don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name.

Click the ‘Save’ button to add the URL and save your settings.

4. Images

BtW Importer already downloaded the images that Google hosted for you into your media library and updated your posts to use them. Open Media » Library to see them.

If the plugin missed a few images, or you had images hosted elsewhere, our guide on how to import external images in WordPress shows a plugin that finds and downloads them.

The Google Takeout archive from Step 2 is your safety net. Its Albums folder contains a copy of every image you ever uploaded to Blogger, in original quality.

Step 7: Verify Your Migration in Google Search Console

Now that your content is in place, it is time to let Google know about the change. This step helps Google find your new site faster and protects your search rankings.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Add your new WordPress site to Google Search Console. If you haven’t already, follow our guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.
• Submit your new XML sitemap. Submit your sitemap URL in Google Search Console so Google can discover all your new URLs. For step-by-step instructions, see our guide on how to create a sitemap in WordPress.
• Monitor your 404 errors. Over the next few weeks, keep an eye on the Pages report in Google Search Console to catch any 404 errors. If you spot broken URLs, set up additional redirects for them. You can do that with the free 404 to 301 redirect manager plugin.
• Install Google Analytics. To track your traffic with Google Analytics after the migration and make sure everything is working, we recommend installing MonsterInsights. For more information, see our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

Step 8. Things to Do After Migrating From Blogger to WordPress

Your blog is now on WordPress, and your redirects protect your rankings. Three tasks are worth doing in your first week.

• Pick a fast theme. Your Blogger design does not transfer, so choose a lightweight theme that loads quickly on phones. Our list of the best free WordPress blog themes is a good place to start.
• Install the essential plugins. An SEO plugin, a contact form, and a backup plugin cover most blogs. See our list of must-have WordPress plugins.
• Set up backups. On Blogger, Google looks after your content. On WordPress, you are in charge, so pick one of the best WordPress backup plugins and schedule automatic backups.

Frequently Asked Questions About Switching From Blogger to WordPress

Is anyone still using Blogger?

Yes. Blogger is still online, and Google has not announced any plans to close it.

However, it only gets a few new features these days, and Google has now folded even its backup tool into Google Takeout.

Most bloggers who want to grow their blog move to WordPress because it’s easy to customize the appearance and extend its features.

What happens to my old Blogger blog after migration?

Your old Blogger blog will still exist after the migration. In fact, you need to keep it active, because the redirect code in your Blogger theme is what sends visitors to your new WordPress site.

Don’t delete your Blogger blog, as that would remove the redirects and cost you traffic.

We hope this article helped you switch from Blogger to WordPress without affecting your Google search rankings. You may also want to see our guide to which WordPress plan you should use or the most common WordPress myths debunked.

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