Migrating a site to Wordpress
-
I've recently been converting our old website to a wordpress based website and been working on the new version of the site on a subdomain.
Now at the stage when I am getting ready to let the site go live and just wondering exactly how to do this so I have minimal downtime?
Looking in the wordpress control panel there is the setting to enter the address of the site if you want it to be different from the directory it has been installed within - is this a good idea (i.e. is it stable if I do this? good for seo, bad for seo or makes no difference?)?
or should I manually install everything in the root myself (if I do this is there a way to direct people to the temp version of the site on the subdomain?
Any tips, do and don't s would be appreciated as I want to do this right!
-
Cheers Dan,
Once it's live I will be double, triple, quadruple checking everything! Paranoid I will miss something or do something wrong!
Planning on doing it when I've a lot of time to spare just to be on safe side in case things go wrong!
I shall give the plugin a go as well I think.
Thanks
Ted
-
Hey There
Paul's right, it's going to be impossible to suggest exactly how to do this, since there's several nuanced steps that could be involved.
This is by far the best resource to follow if you're doing it by hand.
There are some plugins and third party sites like Manage WP (which I used once with success) that can help too.
Once the WordPress site is up and live, you'll want to crawl it to look for broken links. The biggest thing is making sure all the old URLs redirect to the new ones.
Hope that helps!
-Dan
-
Thanks both, I'll probably try the redirecting of a folder but I shall test it all first on a new folder just to be on the safe side - to be honest the testing on a different folder never even crossed my mind (why did I not think of that!)
Thank you!
Ted
-
If your unfamiliar with your hosting console you may want to test the process before you actually follow through with it. Or plan to do it super early or super late in the day to minimize downtime if you hit a snag. There are so many different hosting consoles and possibilities that are impossible to cover here.
I'm going to make the assumption that your host will allow you to redirect a domain to a different folder.
so: www.example.com -points to -> /htdocs
and dev.example.com -points to -> /dev
In the past I typically just use the wordpress console to make the change under the general settings to the correct domain(note this will break the wordpress for the moment on the development domain dev.example.com). I then redirect my primary URL(www.example.com) to the folder I'm using for the development domain.
IF your host doesn't allow this, there are other options besides changing the data at the database level within PHPmyadmin. If your comfortable with PHPMyAdmin then go for it. Either way it wouldn't hurt to setup dev2.example.com and follow thru the process just to test things out and know the steps before you break anything.
Good Luck!
-
Okay so let say this:
You have installed your new site at:
- Open phpmyadmin (or any other MySql editor) and locate the link above inside the option table. IMGHERE
- Edit that row to match your domain (installation folder EX: www.example.com)
- Copy all the content how is to the new location (root)
- Go to THIS LINK and learn how to edit your wp-config file
- And you are done
Depending how fast you can act and how fast your server is, this steps can be made under 30 seconds.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My news site not showing in "In the news" list on Google Web Search
I got a news website (www.tapscape.com) which is 6 years old and has been on Google News since 2012. However, whenever I publish a news article, it never shows up "In the news" list on Google Web Search. I have already added the schema.org/NewsArticle on the website and have checked it if it's working or not on Google structured data testing tool. I see everything shows on on the structured data testing tool. The site already has a news sitemap (http://www.tapscape.com/news-sitemap.xml) and has been added to Google webmaster tools. News articles show perfectly fine in the News tab, but why isn't the articles being shown on "In the news" list on the Google web search? My site has a strong backlink background already, so I don't think I need to work on the backlinks. Please let me know what I'm doing wrong, and how can I get it to the news articles on "In the news" list. Below is a screenshot that I have attached to this question to help you understand what I mean to say. 1qoArRs
Web Design | | hakhan2010 -
How to add SEO Content to this site
Hi Great community and hope you guys can help! I have just started on a SEO project for http://bit.ly/clientsite , the clients required initial KPI is Search Engine Rankings at a fairly low budget. The term I use for the site is a "blurb site", the content is thin and the initial strategy I want to employ to get the keyword rankings is to utilize content. The plan is to: add targeted, quality (user experience & useful) and SEO content on the page itself by adding a "read more" link/button to the "blurb" on the right of the page (see pink text in image) when someone clicks on the "read more", a box of content will slide out styled much the same as the blurb itself and appear next to and/or overlay over the blurb and most of the page (see pink rectangle in image) Question: Is this layer of targeted , quality (user experience & useful) and SEO content (which requires an extra click to get to it) going to get the same SEO power/value as if it were displayed traditionally on the initial display? If not, would it be better to create a second page (2<sup>nd</sup> layer) and have the read more link to that and then rel-canonical the blurb to that 2<sup>nd</sup> page, so that all the SEO passes to this expanded content and the second page/layer is what will show up in the rankings? Thanks in advance qvDgZNE
Web Design | | Torean0 -
Site Speed for Magento Site
We have our site all ready for test users but the site speed is painfully slow. Our developers are a bit stymied about what to do. Is anyone a site speed expert or know of anyone good that can evaluate our site and tell us what's going wrong? Thanks!
Web Design | | EcomLkwd1 -
Is there something fundamentally wrong with our site architecture?
Hi everyone! Could a few of you brilliant people take a look at the architecture of this site http://www.ccisolutions.com, and let me know if you see any obvious problems? I have run the site through XENU, and all of our most important pages, including categories and products, are no deeper than level 3. Everything deeper than that is, in most cases, an image, a pdf or an orphaned page (of which we have thousands). Could having thousands upon thousands of orphaned pages be having a more hurtful effect on our rankings than our site architecture? I have made loud noises and suggested that duplicate content, site speed and dilution of page authority due to all those orphaned pages are some of the primary reasons we don't rank as well as we could. But, I think those suggestions just aren't sexy or dramatic enough, so there is much shaking of heads and discussion that it must be something fundamentally wrong with site architecture. I know re-arranging the furniture is more fun than scrubbing the floors, but I think our problems are more about fundamental cleanup than moving things around What do you think?
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Managing international sites
Hi all, I am trying to figure out the best way to manage our international sites. We have two locations, 1 in the UK and 1 in the USA. I currently use GEOIP to identify the location of the browser and redirect them using a cookie to index.php?country=uk or index.php?country=usa. Once the cookie is set I use a 301 redirect to send them to index.php, so that Google doesnt see each url as duplicate content, which Webmaster tools was complaining about. This has been working wonderfully for about a year. It means I have a single php language include file and depending on the browser location I will display $ or £ and change the odd ise to ize, etc. Problem I am starting to notice is that we are starting to rank better and better in the USA search result. I am guessing this is because the crawlers must be based out of the USA. This is great, but my concern is that I am losing rank in the UK, which is currently where most of our business is done out of... So I have done my research and because I have a .net will go for a /uk/ or /us/ sub folder and create two separate webmaster tools site and set them up to target each geographic location. Is this okay? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#2 HERE IS THE PROBLEM: I don't was to have to run two separate website with two separate sets of copy. Also, I dont want to lose all the rank data on urls like: http://www.mysite.net/great-rank-result.html now becomes http://www.mysite.net/uk/great-rank-result.html. On top of this I will have two pages, the one just mentioned and now adding http://www.mysite.net/us/great-rank-result.html, which I presume would be seen as duplicate copy? (Y/n) Can I use rel canonical to overcome this? How can I don't this without actually running the two pages. Could you actually have 1 site in the root folder and just use the same GEOIP techology to do a smart MOD REWRITE adding either UK or US to the url therefore being able to create two webmaster accounts targeting each geographic location? Any advise is most welcome.
Web Design | | Mediatomcat0 -
Wordpress drop down menu issue...
While I am tweaking my current site with getting rid of my footer links, my site will not allow a drop down menu for my service area parent page. It will do a drop down menu for any other tab. Could not find anything in a google search besides just link to parent for drop down... Any ideas?
Web Design | | greenjoe0 -
Mobile Web Sites
Hi I have started offering customers a mobile app view of their existing websites using sencha touch which works well. On visiting the website if a user visits via a mobile device they access the mobile app view of the site. I am looking for some best practice please - as many of the customers already have hosting with their existing website so would it be possible to use a subdomain of m.theirdomain.com which will point to the mobile website which will be hosted on our servers in the cloud. Or is the only alternative to use a subdomain for their mobile sites because they are hosted with us in the cloud of businessname.ourdomain.com ? Many Thanks
Web Design | | ocelot0