Site migration from Drupal to WordPress - Question about Drupal Back end
-
This is really a developer/Webmaster issue. The closest category available to select was "Technical SEO" - but technically, this isn't a question about SEO, per se.
I am doing free SEO work for a local arts organization as my way of giving them a charitable contribution. Despite my advice to stay on Drupal and improve the site on its current platform, they want something easier to manage for volunteers. This is perfectly understandable, although not my recommendation.
Of course, not knowing anything about SEO, their first impulse was to simply shut down the old site, cancel all of their old pages, point the domain to their new WordPress site and completely start over. Thank goodness I yelled "Halt!" before they went this far
They really have no idea what they are doing and I want to help guide them through this process in a way that preserves as much as possible their inbound links (they have tons of .edu and .gov links because they are a local community arts organization). Of course they don't understand how valuable these are, so I have a lot of educating to do.
I am trying to get them a quote from a professional developer to help migrate from Drupal to WordPress. The only login information anyone has been able to send me is login to their FTP. No one seems to have a login for the Drupal CMS back end, and when I asked for it they looked like deer caught in headlights
Can someone tell me, or even send me a screenshot of what the admin login page looks like for a Drupal site, so I can explain better to this client what I am looking for? I have no experience with Drupal, but surely, there is a backend where the site pages and content can be updated.? There must also be a database of customers/registrants, etc. not to mention a place where all the meta tags, etc can be entered and stored?
Last but not least, if no one is able to find their site's Drupal login info, is there any way under the sun for me to retrieve it for them?
I have a Developer in mind whose got loads of experience migrating from Drupal to WP, but he needs a .sql export file with the contents of the curent databse in order to give us a quote. Does anyone have any advice? (Other than "This should teach you not to offer your services up to charity!" LOL)
-
Glad I could assist, Dana. Good luck!
P.
-
Thanks very much Paul! This is wonderfully helpful. I do believe they have their hosting information so we should be able to proceed this way if necessary. I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction!
Dana
-
Paul's advice is sound Dana, shouldn't take too long to do either.
-
Dana, if "all" you need from the old install is a .sql export, that can be done from the hosting control panel (eg cPanel) or directly from phpMyAdmin even if there's no hosting control panel in use. That eliminates the need to access the Drupal install altogether
I would find out who they're hosting with and if they have the hosting control panel credentials, log in there and retrieve the sql dump. If they don't have the credentials, it's usually only a few minutes with the hosting company proving you have all the payment info necessary to prove that you (ie the arts org) own the hosting account. Then the host will provide new credentials and you can go ahead with the sql dump.
Paul
-
Thanks Jason,
Yes, that appears that it might be it. Of course I am getting an "Access Denied" response right now which is understandable. I have sent this along to the folks at the organization in hopes it rings a bell and they can track down login credentials.
I just discovered that the way they've been "updating" the site for the past several months is by creating PDFs and uploading them via FTP
ugh...
-
There will generally be a "login" button on the front page of the website. If not, try this....
The path is:
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
-
Recently re-built our site and changed domain. Now I want to go back to old domain - it it a bad idea?
About a year ago I rebuilt our website and changed our domain name. We rent villas in Tuscany, we used to be 'invitationtotuscany.com'. Then I started doing the same in Provence, and in the italian lakes, so i had further sites called invitationtoprovence.com and invitationtotheitalianlakes.com. But maintaining them was awkward and I wanted to have one site. So I put them all onto invitationto.com and did 301s from the old domains and sites. Now I'd dropped off organic search results and I've also realised that invitationto.com is far less clear as a business address. My inclination is to go back to invitationtotuscany.com - Tuscany is still 80% of our business and have the other areas in there too - optimised for SEO for Provence etc. I'm being told its a really bad idea to change domain, 301 the old one, and then revert to the original domain. But I'm suffering anyway, so I wonder if I sjhouldn't just bite the bullet. A lot of my old good backlinks still point to invitationtotuscany.com (BBC, Sunday Times, etc) and the DA is 33 against 22 on the new one.. All help gratefully received! : )
Technical SEO | | DanWrightson0 -
Recently migrated to https version of volusion site. 301 redirect link chain question
I recently migrated to a https version of a volusion site. They have some type of internal 301 redirect method to accommodate for the entire site. I have also used the 301 redirect manager to redirect categories and pages which I have changed. The question is if I have changed a page internally in the redirect manager from say source. /bluewidget to say. target. /superbluewidget is it wiser or even possible to do it this way to reduce the redirect chain from 3 to 2 steps source. /bluewidget to. target https://www.example/superbluewidget can a relative link be targeted to a full url to reduce steps in a 301 redirect link chain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mrkingsley0 -
Meta Data Question
Hi There, I am working on the umbraco CMS and we have a Menu page which sits under one page on the CMS. When accessing this page on the front end and navigating between the food menu / drinks menu, the url changes depending on which content you are on, however i have only one place to input a meta title and description meaning that it is seeing them as duplicate content as both the drinks menu url and food menu url are showing the same meta data. Hopefully this makes sense, does anyone have anything similair where a url change happens when content within the page changes.
Technical SEO | | AlexStanleyGK0 -
I'm thinking I might need to canonicalize back to the home site and combine some content, what do you think?
I have a site that is mostly just podcasts with transcripts, and it has both audio and video versions of the podcasts. I also have a blog that I contribute to that links back to the video/transcript page of these podcasts. So this blog I contribute to has the exact same content (the podcast; both audio and video but no transcript) and then an audio and video version of this podcast. Each post of the podcast has different content on it that is technically unique but I'm not sure it's unique enough. So my question is, should I canonicalize the posts on this blog back to the original video/transcript page of the podcast and then combine the video with the audio posts. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Does it matter if I leave image links pointing to old site when I move a wordpress blog?
Hi everyone I am moving a blog from one site to another. I have all the 301 redirects etc under control, but my question has to do with image links in the blogs. The image links all point over to the old site once the posts are copied over. Is this a major problem from an SEO perspective? Lots of links pointing out to an old site? It won't matter from the users perspective as I have 'none' for the image URL, so the user will never know. I will reload all the images if necessary but boy that will be a lot of work. Or is there a shortcut? Thanks very much Wendy
Technical SEO | | Chammy0 -
Canonical Question
Our site has thousands of items, however using the old "Widgets" analogy we are unsure on how to implement the canonical tag, and if we need to at all. At the moment our main product pages lists all different "widget" products on one page, however the user can visit other sub pages that filter out the different versions of the product. I.e. glass widgets (20 products)
Technical SEO | | Corpsemerch
glass blue widgets (15 products)
glass red widgets (5 products)
etc.... I.e. plastic widgets (70 products)
plastic blue widgets (50 products)
plastic red widgets (20 products)
etc.... As the sub pages are repeating products from the main widgets page we added the canonical tag on the sub pages to refer to the main widget page. The thinking is that Google wont hit us with a penalty for duplicate content. As such the subpages shouldnt rank very well but the main page should gather any link juice from these subpages? Typically once we added the canonical tag it was coming up to the penguin update, lost a 20%-30% of our traffic and its difficult not to think it was the canonical tag dropping our subpages from the serps. Im tempted to remove the tag and return to how the site used to be repeating products on subpages.. not in a seo way but to help visitors drill down to what they want quickly. Any comments would be welcome..0 -
Site Purchase and 301
Hello, I just started working with a new client. Since then the client has purchased another company. We have re-branded the new companies home page and 301 redirected the rest of the site's links to the corresponding pages on the holding companies site. Since then the rankings have tanked. I looked at both companies back link profiles and realized that they are quite spammy from the last SEO contractor they hired. That said, the site was ranking fine until last Friday. I was wondering if anyone had seen temporary rankings decrease after 301ing a domain to a different site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TargetClick0 -
Site Crawl
I was wondering if there was a way to use SEOmoz's tool to quickly and easily find all the URLs on you site and not just the ones with errors. The site that I am working on does not have a site map. What I am trying to do is find all the URLs along with their titles and description tags. Thank you very much for your help
Technical SEO | | pakevin0