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
-
Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.
Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?
Technical SEO | | Rezza0 -
Disavow questions
Pretty sure I know the answers to these but someone asked me to make absolutely sure so here goes, any opinions welcome: If i disavow a whole domain does it include all sub-domains on the domain also?- my answer is clearly yes. If i have network of links really bad linking to my website that are already nofollow but awful websites to be linked on, is it worth putting them in the disavow list anyway to basically tell Google literally no association? I know the whole point of disavow is to essentially nofollow the link. Opinions much appreciated, thank you guys.
Technical SEO | | tdigital0 -
Any ideas why this site is being penalized?
http://www.my-french-house.com/ has been online since around 2004 and has nearly always been in the top 10 serps for terms like 'property for sale in france'. However, over the last 12 months we've been hit really hard by Google and have fallen dramatically in rank. Can anyone give any insight into what may have happened? As an aside, we've had no message in the Google Webmaster Console and have not contacted Google about the apparent penalty / penalization. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers Jim
Technical SEO | | jimpannell0 -
Canonical question
I have at least three duplicate main pages on my website: www.augustbullocklaw.com www.augustbullocklaw.com/index augustbullocklaw.com I want the first one, www.augustbullocklaw.com to be the main page. I put this code on the index page and uploaded it to my site: http://www.augustbullocklaw.com/canonical-version-of-page/" rel="canonical" /> This code now appears on all three pages shown above. Did I do this correctly? I surmise that www.augustbullocklaw.com is pointing to itself. Is that ok? I don't know how to take the cononical code off the page that is the page I want to be the main page. (I don't know how to remove it from www.augustbullocklaw.com, but leave it on www.augustbullocklaw.com/index and augustbullocklaw.com) Thanks
Technical SEO | | Augster990 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Ask a Question
Using SEOmoz for the first time, the initial crawl said we have 9,00 errors which were basically 4,500 duplicate pages and 4,500 dupllicate page titles. (ie http://domainname/etc .html, and http://www.domainmname/etc .html
Technical SEO | | FFTCOUK
We altered our website accordingly by changing all internal links to http://www.domainmname/etc .html as Google and all other rngines are listing us using the www. prefix. On the next crawl we now have even more of these duplicate errors. How d we go about removing them as we only have one file for each on the server. Google has down graded our website in April by 35% and ass this is a retail site we are losing a lot of business. I would very much appreciate it if anyone has the time to amswer. Howard0 -
Google not visiting my site
Hi my site www.in2town.co.uk which is a lifestyle magazine has gone under a major refit. I am still working on it but it should be ready by the end of this week or sooner but one problem i have is, google is not visiting the site. I took a huge gamble to redo the site, even though before the refit i was getting a few thousand visitors a day, i wanted to make the site better as i was getting google webmaster errors. But now it seems google is not visiting the site. for example i am using sh404sef and i have put friendly url in the site and on the home page it has its name and meta tag but when you look at google it is not giving the site a name. Also it has not visited the site since october 13th Can anyone advise how to encourage google to visit the site please.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
My site ranking
Hello, I have a website and working more than 1 year ago,I worked hard last year and paid alot to make guys write articles from my website to other forums so my keywords rank high and got good visitors, then I get in much care in SEO and found SEOMoz with is very nice,when I downloaded the tool bar it was a shock to find my website is almost zero although the big effort I had, I can do more but I need to guide what I exactly need to improve my website,I almost read alot of the beginner PDF and got good information to work with and can hire people to help too. I did a real big work sharing my subjects and i can see them in top#5 google but for other sites and now i found I am still zero 😞 adding my links inside also didnt help or counted. attached the statistics of the website and the competitors site to let me know which important things to take care to jump over. would be very thankful for detailed help, Best Regards 1_01308477251.png 1_01308477465.png
Technical SEO | | nesr_20200