Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Your Google Friend Connect Followers

Getting your Blogger/Blogspot posts, comments and labels moved to WordPress? That’s easy. Getting all the other little details? Not so much. This is the first post in a series that will help you sort through the best methods for making the entire process painless.

Today, moving your Google Friend Connect followers from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress blog!

NOTE: While I do recommend moving your followers, you may want to avoid installing any Google Friend Connect sidebar widgets or social bars in WordPress. I’ve found most of them to be bandwidth-sucking monsters, capable of making a snappy blog behave move slower than Jabba the Hut after an all-you-can-eat Bantha bar (whatever that is). My point? If you notice your site loading slowly, the GFC widget could be the culprit. You have been warned!

There are two primary ways to make this work—with the help of a WordPress plugin and without.

With the Google Friend Connect Integration plugin:

1. Go to http://google.com/friendconnect.
2. Sign in using your Blogger credentials.
3. In the lefthand column, click on the name of the blog you are migrating.
4. Look at the address bar in your browser. The URL contains a 20-digit ID number; copy that number to your clipboard.
5. Log into your WordPress dashboard.
6. Go to Plugins > Add New.
7. Search for the “Google Friend Connect Integration” plugin by Social Mind.
8. Install it!
9. Go to Settings > GFC Integration.
10. Paste your ID number (from step #4) into the “Friend Connect SiteId” field.
11. Save!

Without a plugin:

1. Go to http://google.com/friendconnect.
2. Sign in using your Blogger credentials.
3. In the lefthand column, click on the name of the blog you are migrating, then Settings.
4. Change “Home URL” to reflect the new location of your blog.
5. Save!

As you can see, making the basic change is quite simple without a plugin. The plugins, however, make creating sidebar widgets much easier. Choose your own adventure—and let me know how it goes!

NOTE: There is a third option, which I think is the best of them all. Contact each of your GFC followers personally, inform them of your migration to WordPress, and encourage them to subscribe by other means, e.g. Feedburner email or simple RSS. It may take longer, but it’s personal, it trims out unnecessary baggage in your site’s code, and allows you to have more complete closure with your previous life on Blogger!