Moving My Blog From Blogger To WordPress (and changing the permalink structure!)

When I first moved The Literary Lioness over to WordPress back in 2017, I made SO. MANY. MISTAKES.

I was DETERMINED not to make those same mistakes when I recently moved my other blog, New Jersey Memories, over to WordPress.

Moving From Blogger to WordPress

I loved Blogger but I needed to move to WordPress.

Google Search Console (GSC) was refusing to index some of my posts, no matter how many times I submitted sitemaps.

You would think that since Blogger is a Google product that there would be no problems.

But GSC remained stubbornly aloof.

Getting Used To WordPress

Things have changed a lot in WordPress since 2017.

The Block Editor was announced in 2018.

Things did not go smoothly for many people, no matter how much WordPress tells you that it did.

So I kept looking for answers on how to navigate WordPress.

This was especially important when I moved my second blog over to WordPress.

Moving From Blogger To WordPress Tutorials

I discovered an excellent resource for non-techies learning WordPress in WPBeginner.

Since I already had a custom domain on Blogger, I studied the directions on WP Beginner’s TWO great posts on moving from Blogger to WordPress.

I used the first 3 steps from How To Move A Custom Domain Blog To WordPress.

This article is handy when you already HAVE a custom domain, not blogspot.com, which involves extra steps.

If you still have the .blogspot name in your blog you can skip this part.

I already had my custom domain from GoDaddy so that link was PERFECT for my needs.

So many articles about blog migration don’t take into account that many people on Blogger have already paid for custom domains.

This article explains how to change the DNS settings.

If you have a custom domain, you originally set it up to point to your Blogger blog.

Now it must be changed to point to your new WordPress site.

I signed up with BlueHost.

Yes, I purchased cheap hosting because I don’t have a lot of traffic on that blog right now. So far, it seems fine.

Trouble Ahead

After that, I continued on my move with the great WP Beginner tutorial: How To Switch From Blogger to WordPress without Losing Google Rankings.

It wasn’t until I got to Step #3: Permalinks that I skidded into trouble.

When I moved The Literary Lioness from Blogger to WordPress I encountered the problems with permalinks and permalink structure.

Permalink structures are very different on WordPress than they are on Blogger.

I did not pay any attention to this when I moved The Literary Lioness over and I had never heard of the Redirection plugin.

All of my links from Blogger were totally broken. I had NO IDEA how to fix them.

I discovered that there is not only one way to do most things in WordPress.

Shorter Permalink Structure

So I debated this problem with myself for WEEKS!

Should I take the easy way out and use the new CUSTOM permalink structure so many articles suggested?

Or should I go for the shorter structure that I really wanted?

Should I change it NOW or LATER?

Because I ultimately wanted to have that POST NAME permalink structure.

I had played around with several SEO plugins for WordPress on The Literary Lioness.

But I prefer RankMath for multiple reasons.

They have a section for Redirections, so I didn’t have to install that plugin separately.

I wanted to use the same plugin for New Jersey Memories.

I made SURE that the Redirections section on RankMath was turned ON.

WP Beginner strongly suggested (and so did MANY other tutorials) that I try to use a custom link structure to make it as close to Blogger as possible.

This was suggested as the custom permalink structure:

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

This makes TOTAL sense if you have thousands of views a month and hundreds of posts on your blog and it would make the transition easier.

But I hadn’t been posting on the blog and hardly anyone was visiting it.

I REALLY didn’t want the old Blogger-style permalink structure. I know that simply moving over to WordPress would delete the www part.

I also wanted to get rid of the month and day and also the .html at the end.

I wanted my permalinks to actually reflect what my post was about.

One of my Blogger posts looked like THIS:

https://www.newjerseymemories.com/2015/05/tv-thursdays-morley-safer-and-modern-art.html

Now that is WAY TOO LONG.

I had long since changed the title of the posts to not have Blog Hop names (such as Music Mondays and Wordless Wednesdays in the title. But I couldn’t change the slugs on Blogger.

I knew that I would be changing some of the URL slugs in the future, and I already knew the www would be automatically removed.

I also didn’t want the date OR the .html at the end.

If I decided upon the “Post Name”

My mouse hovered over the “Post Name” permalink structure.

“Do it! Do it!”

I clicked on Post Name.

I did it!

Much to my surprise, WordPress changed the slugs automatically to the CURRENT TITLE of the post. All of the Blog hop titles were gone.

However, I still had to shorten many of the “slugs” in the permalinks.

Thank goodness for the Redirection plugin.

Of course, now I had over 100 404 pages.

I made sure that the Redirection plugin section was turned ON.

I went to each separate post and checked to make sure the URL was what I wanted.

Sometimes RankMath would still tell me the permalink was too long, so I would shorten the slug.

This automatically set up Redirections so that the OLD Permalink pointed to the NEW permalink.

so the new slugs went from

https://www.newjerseymemories.com/2015/05/tv-thursdays-morley-safer-and-modern-art.html

To

https://newjerseymemories.com/morley-safer-and-modern-art-television/

I still had to check the 404 Section for “lost” links.

I did have one post that got stuck in a Redirect Loop. It had done it 191 times before I shut that down.

I couldn’t even access the post until I did that.

Any random old posts that didn’t redirect could be changed in the Redirections area.

If they were posts I had kept, they received a 301 Redirection.

All deleted posts (I deleted many posts before the move) could also get a permanent 410 (permanently deleted) Redirection.

So one of my old post permalinks was changed from this:

https://www.newjerseymemories.com/2010/07/wordless-wednesday-4-abandoned-trains.html

to THIS:

https://newjerseymemories.com/abandoned-trains-in-new-york-state/

So I successfully changed over AND changed the permalink structure!

I also submitted a new sitemap to Google Search Console and deleted the old sitemaps (which were all Blogger links)

Two weeks of absolutely no response from Google Search Console.

Then it quietly started indexing the posts – all under the NEW permalink structure!

Success!

You may also want to read My Brand-New Computer Was Built Especially For Me!

Thank you for reading The Literary Lioness!