The Web Wrangler

Unlike a lot of web professionals, I have nothing against Blogger or their free hosting site, Blogspot. I’ve had at least one blog on Blogger since January of 2000, and I’ve seen how they’ve grown into a pretty impressive simple content management site. It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of a self-hosted WordPress blog site, but it does have tons more flexibility than WordPress.com.

That said, since Blogger/Blogspot sites are so easy to create and manage, and all for free, there’s a tendency for people to look down on them, and some of the reasons are legitimate. Keeping your Blogspot domain isn’t that great for SEO, for one thing. For another, the Blogger navbar that goes across the top of a Blogspot-hosted site looks less than professional and creates an impression that you’re not that invested in your blog.

Fortunately, these are both easy fixes. I’m not going into detail here about how to hide the navbar, mainly because there’s a perfectly good guide to doing so right here. But I am going to tell you how to replace your Blogspot url with a custom domain. I’m not sure if so many bloggers don’t do this because they simply don’t know that they can, or because they just don’t know how. Well, now you know both, so there are no more excuses. If you want to have a professional web presence hosted by Blogger, this is what you need to do.

1. Log into your Blogger dashboard, find your blog, and click on Settings.
2. Click the Publishing tab on the navigation sub-menu.
3. See where it says, “You’re publishing on blogspot.com”? Under that, there’s a link that says Custom Domain. Click it.
4. The next screen will allow you to select and purchase your own dot-com domain. Buying a domain through Blogger/Google will cost $10 (for an entire year), and is the easiest option.
5. After you make the purchase you’ll be asked to fill out the domain registration form. Fill out the information and click Next.
6. On the next screen you’ll need to provide billing and payment info and accept the Terms of Service agreement.
7. Clicking Next will take you to the Google Checkout page where you can review and complete your order.
8. …and you’re done!

Once you purchase the domain, Google will do the rest for you. It might take up to 48 hours for the domain settings to update across the entire Internet, so it’s a good idea to do this on the weekend and give your new domain plenty of time to kick in before publicizing it.

One caveat: sometimes, a glitch causes the domain settings to get “stuck.” If this happens and your blog fails to show up on your custom domain after 48 hours, try this trick to unstick it: Go back to step 3 above and click “Switch to Blogspot.” Save these settings, and then click the Custom Domain link again. This time, click on Advanced Settings, enter your new domain, and save your changes. Check the Redirect box, and save again.  According to this article (and to this forum post), your blog should then start showing up at the new domain.

If that wasn’t clear enough for you, here’s a video I found that can walk you visual learners through the simple process of setting up your own domain on Blogger: