Site Migration between CMS's
-
Hi There,
I have a technical question about migrating CMS's but not servers. My client has site A on Joomla install, He want's ot migrate to Wordpress and we will call this site B. As he has a lot of old content on site A he doesn't want to lose, he has put site B (wordpress install) on a subdirectory site.com/siteb (for example). and will use a htaccess to forward the root domain to this wordpress site.
Therefore anyone going to www.site.com will see the new wordpress site and the old content and joomla install will sit on the root of the server. Will Google have an issue with this? Will it even find the old content? what are the issues for the new site and new content?
Look forward getting your guys input
-
Hi
- Once the 301 redirects are in place and they should be done page by page not domain to buy domain.
- Creating a separate new URL that will hold content will not help actually it will hurt because that new URL will not have any authority.
- Simply redirect the URLs to the most relevant or exact URL on Wordpress.
- Take any of the quality content from the old (CMS A) and move that over to (CMS B) a.k.a. WordPress
You will need a few of the things below. One of the most important ones is either a copy of screaming frog preferably the Pro version or deep crawl
My preferred method is to use both but deep crawl rocks look at this article about site redevelopment it will index both sites and really make your life a lot easier
Definitely download the free version! & a pro- of screaming fraud there is a paid version it is 100 British pounds
Read this guide it has incredible insight on how to use both tools
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/
Here are the basics that you don't want to stray from at all take all this in before changing the URL.
-
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
-
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067216/The-10-Step-Site-Migration-Process
-
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-move-your-site-from-joomla-to-wordpress/
-
http://www.reviewzntips.com/migrate-from-joomla-to-wordpress/
I hope this helps,
Thomas
-
Hi Neal,
If I understand what you're saying - you're not really doing a migration - you will be running two CMS's in parallel; the current content will remain in Joomla & the new url will be created in Wordpress. People visiting the homepage will be redirected to site.com/wordpress_site/index.htm
If this is the case, this solution doesn't really look future proof. First of all there is the maintenance issue, you'll have to maintain two systems. Very soon, you will probably only update the Wordpress site & neglect the Joomla site and the two sites will become completely disconnected (and the Joomla content outdated). At one point, you will probably want to retire the Joomla application & then you will have to redirect the entire site to the root again.
I had a similar case when we did a partial migration (part of the site migrated to the new cms in a subfolder / part remained on the old cms on the root). The part which was migrated was one of the traffic generators of the site & we really had a very big drop in traffic (as this new part was almost disconnected from the rest of the site. To be honest, there were also a lot of other issues with the new cms, which probably had part in the traffic loss )
I would recommend you to check if you can't migrate the content from the old cms into the new one (at least the part which is generating traffic). If this is not possible, or difficult on short timeframe - I would 301 the Joomla site to archive.site.com (or site.com/archive) & put the new site on the root. In a second step - you can then put the content from the old site into the new one and redirect from the archive to the new site.
Dirk
-
HI Neil,
The joomla installation will in effect be 'deactivated' when you switch the htaccess rules over to serving the root from the wp install (you will also be replacing index.php in the root folder if memory serves). Google will not have a problem with this BUT the old joomla content will not be available anymore (to users or bots). You will be recreating the old content on the new wp install also right?
You will need to make sure your 301s are setup properly from the old joomla urls to the new wp urls and you will need to wait until after the switch to the wp site to verify these are working properly so a bit of preplanning and verification afterwards will be needed there. Other than that all the usual best practices for switching to a new site are all still of importance, check out this guide for a good rundown. Hope it helps!
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
-
Site redesign makes Moz Site Crawl go haywire
I work for an agency. Recently, one of our clients decided to do a complete site redesign without giving us notice. Shortly after this happened, Moz Site Crawl reported a massive spike of issues, including but not limited to 4xx errors. However, in the weeks that followed, it seemed these 4xx errors would disappear and then a large number of new ones would appear afterward, which makes me think they're phantom errors (and looking at the referring URLs, I suspect as much because I can't find the offending URLs). Is there any reason why this would happen? Like, something wrong with the sitemap or robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | YYSeanBrady1 -
How to replace a custom platform's homepage with another homepage from another platform domain?
I have a question regarding 301 permanent redirection. I currently have three websites, each hosted by different platform/CMS: one by Wix, another by WordPress, and a custom built CMS. I want to have all my three websites to be under the the custom build CMS's URL. What I am most concerned about is that I would like to have the home page of my Wix website to become my custom build CMS's new home page and the original content currently under my custom build CMS would be updated under new sub directories (in which I have access to the custom build CMS's source code). I have never done a 301 redirect before and I would like to know if there is any additional thing I need to do to my current custom build CMS besides assigning all my current content under my custom build CMS to new directories before executing 301 redirects?
Technical SEO | | sihanedutech0 -
Selling same products under separate brands and can't consolidate sites...duplicate content issues?
I have a client selling home goods online and in-store under two different brand names in separate regions of the country. Currently, the websites are completely identical aside from branding. It is unlikely that they would have the capacity to write unique titles and page content for each website (~25,000 pages each), and the business would never consolidate the sites. Would it make sense to use canonical tags pointing to the higher-performing website on category and product pages? This way we could continue to capture branded search to the lesser brand while consolidating authority on the better performing website. What would you do?
Technical SEO | | jluke.fusion0 -
Conversion of URL's for Readability
Reading over Rands latest Post about URL structure I had a quick question about the best way to convert URL's that don't have perfect URL structure... Current the Structure of our E-commerce store has a structure that is not friendly with domain.com/product/zdcd-jobd3d-fdoh what is the easiest way to convert these to read URL's without causing any disruptions with the SERP. Are we talking about a MOD-Rewrite in the CMS.......
Technical SEO | | CMcMullen0 -
Need advice for new site's structure
Hi everyone, I need to update the structure of my site www.chedonna.it Basicly I've two main problems: 1. I've 61.000 index tag (more with no post)2. The category of my site are noindex I thought to fix my problem making the category index and the tag noindex, but I'm not sure if this is the best solution because I've a great number of tag idexed by Google for a long time. Mybe it is correct just to make the category index and linking it from the post and leave the tag index. Could you please let me know what's your opinion? Regards.
Technical SEO | | salvyy0 -
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 -
How to remove entire directory off Google's Cache
The old version of Webmaster tools used to allow you to select whether to remove a single page from index or an entire directory.
Technical SEO | | vpahwa
http://www.canig.com/pageimages/submitremovalrequest.jpg How can I do this with the new Webmaster Tools? I can't find the option to remove an entire directory.0 -
Unnatural Link Warning Removed - WMT's
Hi, just a quick one. We had an unnatural link warning for one of our test sites, the message appeared on the WMT's dashboard. The message is no longer there, has it simply expired or could this mean that Google no longer sees an unatural backlink profile? Hoping it's the latter but doubtful as we haven't tried to remove any links.. as I say it's just a test site. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Webpresence0