How to transfer old WP blog to new URL

[wianno168]

I have a 9 year old WP website  with a WP blog which is still getting 300+ new visitors a day even though I have not written a blog for 5 years and have not updated content. Some posts have over 25,000 links.

However the Moz analytics  is fraught with significant errors-404 redirects, page not found, dup content, no metatags, title too long etc. I was totally inexperienced 5 years ago and made many errors. However the basic content was sound and still is producing new visitors.

I am starting a new ecommerce website using the same name but the URL and server will be different. I want to transfer my WP blog to the new site. I am concerned however that bringing the posts over can create the same errors on the new site.

If I update all of the blogs on the old site using Yoast before transferring the blog to the new site will that help. I suppose I could check those flagged dup content and only transfer one of that category?

[wianno168]

Jane,

Thank you very much. This is the second time you have helped me!

Thanks

Brooke

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Check out Wordpress's page on importing old content as well. The Wordpress information is towards the bottom of the page (there are instructions for a bunch of other blogging platforms). As jStrong said, this will be easier if you are importing to a new Wordpress installation rather than to a different CMS.

[wianno168]

Thank you very much-you have given me hope!!!

[Whebb]

Hello,

If you are moving the content to another wordpress install there are plugins that will help make the move easier. You could work on cleaning up the 404s and meta errors before you move the site, but in my experience migrations sometimes to do not bring the content over 'cleanly'. If you can move the content to the new site and work on it before the site is launched, I think that would be ideal. Especially if the URLs are going to be different,  move the content then work on cleaning it all up. It's just easier to do this way IMO since you can see how it will all look beforehand. And yes, depending on the tool you use to aid in the migration, I would try and only bring over good content, not duplicates  and broken pages. Also make sure you get all your redirects in order. If this is a large site that has a lot of traffic, mapping all the redirects to new URLs will be key.

Hope that helps.