Best way to change from one CMS to wordpress??

[pakevin]

I have a client that was working with another SEO consultant and they pretty much dropped the ball big time!

The SEO company took his site off of wordpress and put it on another CMS (http://www.wsinetsuccess.com/WSI-E-Fusion). My client would like to take hes site off of the WSI E Fusion platform and back onto wordpress.

My question is how is the best way to going about doing this with out loosing all of the PR to the site?

Should I find all of the URLs that are on the site and just 301 them to the right page?

Thank you very much for your help.

[pakevin]

Thank you sooo much! You rock!!

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Redirection is easy to use and self explnatory. This is what you should do....

1.)Set up your test server on another dormant URL that has hosting and load wordpress and move the site over and test it before you go live.....

2.) Use seomoz webcrawler and crawl the existing site in fusion to give you a detailed list of every URL that you can donwload into excel so you can reverify what you think you know.

3.) Once you move over the site to wordpress, use the plug in sitemap builder and build the sitemap in wordpress and you will know what you have in fusion becuase you can compare the webcrawl you did with the sitemap.....

4.) You might want to use seomoz's linkbuilding tool to verify what types of links the existing site has. If a majority of the links are on only a small portion of the page, then you can worry less about the sitebuilding and more about gettign those redirects correct.

good luck.

[pakevin]

That's another issue that I'm having...there is no site map. When I go into the back office of WSI EFusion and go to create a site map the only thing they have in there is a html editor. I called support and they told me that you had to make it by hand...not the best CMS in the world and they are charging $197 a month to use it.

Right now I'm using Screaming Frog SEO Spider to get all the URLs and then I'm going to use cpanel to do the 301s. I'm going to take a look at "redirection"...do you have any pointers on that?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Would have to see what your sitemap looks like....a number of cms's have great sitemap building features where you could make the transition without redirects. Im not sure about WSI EFusion but I know wordpress has a great plugin that we use to manage sitemap rebuilding and to manage redirects....plug in for redirects is called "redirection" and we have used it on over 30 sites....

Dont be scared of the 301's....you can do them in the cpanel even if you have to do them all manually....

Good luck....

[pakevin]

Hey Guys, thanks for your input. One of the issues that I am having is the URL structure. That is why I'm thinking that a 301 will be the best way to go. I understand that I can loose some PR by using a 301 but the client doesn't want to have anything to do with this company anymore and I really don't blame them.

A huge bonus is that all of the link building that the other SEO company did was to the home page. They did a poor job at the one page optimization and barely did any deep linking.

There are only about 200 pages on the site...should I just do the 301 in cpanel?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Dont make it more complicated than it is.....as long as you can keep the same URL structure, then do it. Use the link analysis tool in seomoz to determine where the link building has been done, and if a majority of the links are tied to the main url's, then it won't have an impact at all.....in fact depending on the on page optimization value of the existing site, you might get an increase with wordpress and one of the better SEO plugins.

[danbocain]

Move over all the content, and setup 301s from the old URLs to the new URLs for every single page on the site. Only exception would be if you were able to keep the exact same URL structure when migrating back to Wordpress.