In a previous post, I discussed the SEO implications of choosing where to host your blog — in a subdomain, separate domain, external blog service or subdirectory. My conclusion, was that hosting your blog in a subdirectory of your primary domain provided the best SEO benefits.
Moving Your Blog to WordPress
So you’ve installed WordPress in a subdirectory of your primary domain. However, you already have an established blog on an external service such as Blogger or WordPress.com, with many posts and many images. What is the easiest way to move that blog to your new self-hosted WordPress blog? Both of the aforementioned services offer the ability to export your blog posts and comments, and your installed copy of WordPress has a “tool” for importing an external blog.
Can You Export / Import Images with the Tools Provided?
The bad news is that whether you use the “tool” in your local WordPress installation to import your external blog or use the export tool in Blogger or WordPress.com to export your blog, it seems you can’t import or export the images. Blogger offers no way to do this, and even though WordPress has an option, when importing a blog, to include images (“Download and import file attachments”), for me this has thrown an error regarding the images and the images in your new blog are still pointing to the WordPress.com URLs (username.files.wordpress.com/…).
Importing Your Blogger Blog to Your WordPress Blog
You can either export your Blogger blog from within the application (See these instructions for exporting your Blogger blog), or do it within WordPress which makes it very easy to import your Blogger posts, comments and users. Here’s the drill:
- Log in as admin to your installed WordPress account
- In the left column, click on “Tools”
- Select “Blogger” — the system from which to import:
- Click “Blogger” and, on the next screen, click the “Authorize” button and you’ll be asked to provide the login credentials in order to import the blog posts, comments.
- After providing your credentials, your blog will be imported.
Importing your WordPress.com blog into WordPress
In order to import your WordPress.com blog into your new WordPress installation, you will first need to log in to your WordPress.com account and export your blog’s posts and comments.
Exporting from WordPress.com
You will be exporting all your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags as an xml file. WordPress refers to this file as a “WXR” (“WordPress eXtended RSS”) file.
- Log in to your WordPress.com account
- In the left column, click “Tools”
and then click “Export.” - Click “Download Export File”
Once you have downloaded the .xml file, you then need to import this file into your WordPress installation.
- Log in as Admin to your WordPress installation
- In the left column, click “Tools”
- Click “Import”
- Click “WordPress” (last option in list)
- Click the “Browse” button to locate the .xml file you exported from your WordPress.com account, double-click the file or select it and click “Open”
- Click “Upload file and import”
- Select the user options and make sure you tick the “Download and import file attachments” option which should result in the images in your WordPress.com blog being imported along with the posts and comments. But I’ve seen many reports of errors “Remote file error: Remote file is incorrect size” and I’m not sure what the fix is for this. Your mileage may vary.
- Click the “Submit” button, and you’ll be redirected to a “success” page. Hopefully, your images will be imported along with everything else.
Exporting and/or Importing the Blog Images
My own testing resulted in the “Remote file error: Remote file is incorrect size” message when trying to get the images along with the posts and comments. Hopefully this is something WordPress will address and fix.
If you get the above error, you may have to just grab the images from your blog one at a time, right-clicking them and saving them to your computer and then importing them to your new blog. If anyone has found a workaround for this issue, please let me know via the Comments here.
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