If you missed the first part, you can read it here: My Journey from Blogger to WordPress

After the change of domain name, we felt so happy. Finally! We wouldn’t be referred to as “hungry- bloggers”. We immediately informed those we sought advice from earlier and made the change known to our subscribers. Apparently, they were happy and impressed with how fast and committed we were to change and develop. After that, we continued our normal posting and publicity while patiently waiting for our Google search rankings to rise up. We were so anxious for our blog to be seen on Google’s first page on search results but nothing was forthcoming. We then checked Google, YouTube and other search engines like Ask, Bing for ways to make our Search Engine Rank Positions (SERPs) improve. We got various options like signing up on Google Webmasters, Google Analytics, pinging our website, submitting our web URLs to Search Engines, submitting our sitemaps, editing our robots.txt file, having a lot of valid backlinks and a whole lot of other options like that.

Not to say these methods don’t work but from a lot of other articles written by experienced bloggers, using blogger in any way is not advisable, has a poor SEO and only very few and trusted blogger blogs make it to the first page of Google’s search results. Some days later, I got into a discussion with a senior colleague in my department and he spoke strongly against blogger as he had once used it before porting to WordPress. He then advised me to port as soon as I got the opportunity to. Now, that wasn’t much of a problem as I had once worked with WordPress but the problem was having a completely new design, losing all my previous posts, comments and starting from the scratch. It was hard to think of it even.

Till today, I still cannot pinpoint how I knew my main worry could be resolved. There was or is a way I could port all my posts, drafts and comments from blogger without losing even a punctuation mark. It’s called Exporting. Blogger had the option of compressing all the posts, drafts and comments into an xml file then going to WordPress and unpacking them. Eventually, we bought a hosting plan from the same webhost I bought my domain name from and immediately opened up a manual I had previously written for myself on how to upload a WordPress website online. I actually did all the design and importation offline so all I had to do was just upload.

Following the normal process, after receiving my login details from my hosting company, I logged into my c-panel, compressed my web files into a zip format and then tried to upload them using the file manager of my C-panel but all was to no avail, reasons, I do not know. I talked to Babs who suggested I used File Zilla. I got File Zilla and when I tried uploading, it seemed long and unending, thanks to Nigeria’s poor internet service. Finally, I got all the files uploaded after so much errors and retries.

I then went to my wp-config file and edited the username, database name and password, saved it and was ready to rock and roll. I typed in my blog’s URL and clicked Enter! I was getting a 500 error. I went back to my manual and tried all I could, still I was getting the same error. I tried using Google to check for what the problem might be but I was getting no headway. After a while, I showed an experienced programmer, he went to my error log and we deciphered that one of the files I tried uploading didn’t upload well so I had to start over.

Eventually, I re-uploaded the files and I was ready to go. Then there came a new error. A redirection loop! I edited my wp-config files in different ways possible but I was still getting the same error. Then I remembered I didn’t disconnect my blogger account from the website URL. I did that but still, it was the same error. I searched Google for a possible solution again and saw different ones. I edited my htaccess file, did a lot of other stuff but it was still the same error. I then checked my phpmyadmin tab in my c-panel and realized I didn’t upload my tables from my offline localhost. So, I got my tables compressed and then uploaded them. Edited my wp-options table accordingly and then saved all my changes. I then tried accessing my website using its URL and….. Voila! It was up and running! I immediately sent a text to my partner. Mehn! My joy knew no bounds. After so much travails, I overcame them.

Soon enough, I installed Yoast SEO plugin and a few other important plugins, then I re-submitted my website URL to Google Search Index. After a while, I searched for some of my posts and they came up on the first page of Google’s search results. Now, I’m just going to activate my email service and move on to greater things.

I hope this actually helps someone in some way.

Cheers!


Source: http://www.themchub.com/2016/02/conclusion-of-my-journey-from-blogger-to-wordpress-2/