The Complete Guide To WordPress // How to set up your WordPress blog and import posts

Welcome to the third week of my Complete Guide To WordPress blog course.

Here’s what we’ve covered so far:

• Week One: Why should you move to WordPress?
• Week Two: Which host should you pick?

Today we are talking about how to install your WordPress blog and import previous posts from Blogger and WordPress.com.

In this example, I’ll be using TSOhost to show you how easy it is to install WordPress and import your posts from Blogger or WordPress.com.

When you log in, you want to click onto ‘Account services‘. Then click the link on your active hosting account.

Then click ‘manage‘ on your hosting account. Scroll down to log into the control panel.

Click ‘add website‘ from the top menu bar, enter your URL and press ‘next‘.

This may take a few minutes. After it’s done, go down to the bottom and click ‘Install Applications‘

Then install WordPress.

After a few minutes, you’ll be given a username of random characters and a password you should change right away.

You can click log-in to log into your new blog.

You are now logged into the dashboard of your new blog!

It will have a default theme and now you are ready to import your blog posts (or start blogging if you don’t have an existing blog).

How to import posts from Blogger:

If you are moving from blogger, you’ll want to set your permalink structure to the same as the structure blogger uses to avoid broken links:

http://BLOG NAME.blogspot.com/YEAR/MONTH/BLOG POST.html

You can do this in your settings > permalinks:

If you don’t care about links from your old blog, have a different URL or are new, it’s better to have this set to ‘Post name’ as it’s better for search engine optimisation. Plus, the link looks cleaner.

Click on Plugins > Add New

Then search ‘blogger‘ to find a blogger importer plugin, then click ‘install now‘.

Activate the plugin and then follow these instructions:

How to import your posts from WordPress.com

Log-in to your WordPress.com account. Go to Tools > Export.

Then Download the Export File.

Then go into Tools > Import on your new WordPress blog, click ‘WordPress‘.

Click ‘Install now‘ and follow the instructions.

So this week you’ve:

• Set up your WordPress blog.
• Imported your old posts from your Blogger or WordPress.com blog to WordPress.org

Still to come in the course:

• How to change your URL so it points to WordPress
• How to find a theme you love and your customisation options
• How to create your own header
• Plugins
• Short-cuts to WordPress

This post contains affiliate links.