Migrating to bear

08 Sep, 2022

Congratulations! You've decided to move your blog to Bear!

There are a few useful tools at your disposal to make sure you don't lose any traffic during the migration process, or have broken links in the future. You'll want to keep your existing traffic even if the blog structure is different.

One important caveat: while it is very easy to populate your new blog, there are no automated tools for doing this such as a bulk uploader. This is due to the many different standards across existing platforms from Substack to Blogger.

Setting up your new blog

To ensure you don't have down-time during the migration process, don't move your custom domain over to Bear until you're happy that your new blog is set up and all of your content has been moved over. During that time you can run on your https://your-blog.bearblog.dev domain.

Moving posts over

The easiest way to move existing content to Bear is to create new posts and copy the text content from your existing web pages one at a time¹. You can mark them up as you see fit during this process. If you have a backup of your files as HTML documents, it's as easy as pasting the HTML as your blog content as Bear handles both markdown and HTML natively.

However, if you'd like to keep them all as Markdown instead of HTML (since Markdown is easy to edit), you can convert your posts using HTML-to-Markdown.

Ensure you set your published_date to the original date of publication for the post.

Using the post template

If each of your blog posts are similar, it may be worth setting up the structure in your post template (found on the posts section of your dashboard). Removing the boilerplate content and setting your own parameters will allow you to move posts over more efficiently.

Links

Different blogging platforms have different structures for links. Bear uses a flat structure (eg: https://your.blog/post-title/ where Wordpress could have an obscure structure (eg: https://your.blog/2021/02/13/post-title/). Since we don't want to lose the traffic that is already going to 2021/02/13/post-title/ we can forward all of that traffic to your new post at post-title by using an alias.

title: Post title
link: post-title
alias: 2021/02/13/post-title

This ensures that existing traffic going to the alias does not result in a 404 error.

Images

To ensure your images aren't broken when you move your domain name, make sure to re-upload images for each blog post.

Upvotes

There is currently no way to migrate upvotes from other platforms to Bear.

RSS alias

If you've migrated from a blogging platform with a different feed path, eg: https://example.com/rss/index.xml you'll want to create an alias in Settings > Advanced settings > RSS alias in the dashboard to redirect the old feed without breaking existing subscriptions.

In the above example the RSS Alias should be set to rss/index.xml

Ready!

Once everything looks good and is running at https://your-blog.bearblog.dev it's time to move your domain over. This is done by modifying your DNS records and is covered in the custom domain docs.