Migrating to Wordpress
-
Hi Mozzers, happy friday!
I'm moving a new clients website from a really bad CMS to Wordpress and wondered what I need to do to do this, get the A record of the old programmers? If someone could do me a checklist that'd be great!
Thanks!
-
Yes,
you would most probably give them your IP, except that if they are an agency you would not want them to still have domain control - So just personally, I would get registrar access and get it switched to network solutions or some host like that.
Then, once the registrar transfer is complete, then you have control to point the domain where-ever you want.
-
Thanks Shane,
The website is hosted by an external agency but we are going to be hosting it on our server. Do I give the agency my IP address or is there something specific I need to ask them to do?
-
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
http://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains
The above are more for SEO checks, but to answer the specific A-record question, the A-record is what you would change/create to point to the new server where Wordpress install will be.
Or, if you are swithing regstrars as well you would just change your name servers to point to the new registrar/host.
Most host technical support will help you with this (domain switch not SEO checks), and some even have "free migration" services
Hope this 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
-
Migrate from HTML to Wordpress?
My website is currently HTML because in the past, I liked a more hands-on approach and liked to have a high level of control over my code. My organic search rankings are very good. I do have a blog on wordpress now. Despite all of this, I am considering moving to Word Press. The reason is that the fancier website techniques are very easy to achieve with a wordpress theme or plug-in. And some changes, such as menu, can be done at the high level versus the entire site. Auto-responsive is built within the themes, so anytime a new device comes out, they update it so I don't have to. And, I would like to be more tightly integrated with my blog. I am also getting to the points that I have no time to code and would like something a little simpler to maintain. BUT, I am scared to make the move and then completely lose my organic rankings. I know that I will have to 301 all of the pages. And I know that I will have to maintain all my current on-page SEO by paying close attention to the headers and whatnot. Do you all think that it is worth making the switch? Is there a good chance my organic rankings will drop?
Web Design | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Content Migration & cost of moving pages
Hope you are all having a great day! I am wondering if anyone would be able to provide general feedback. I work for a medium size company in Chicago. Currently our site is static html and we are seeking to migrate to Wordpress. After speaking with a number of website companies and receiving proposals, I am trying to understand if there is an approximate going rate or range for moving content from static html to a CMS like Wordpress? i.e. a cost per page? We don't have any dynamic content. Most of our pages are text and images. The site itself, including the blog is around 220 pages. Thanks in advance for any insight or resources!
Web Design | | SEOSponge0 -
Creating Multiple Sub-Directories in Wordpress
Hi fellow Mozzers, I'm currently in the process of planning/building a website for e-commerce and have stumbled on a bit of a hurdle with sub-directories. I want to use a piece of software called SellerDeck to generate my e-commerce store and also my homepage (index.html). This element of the build is fine as the e-commerce store will sit in a sub-directory of .co.uk/store/. What I'm struggling with is the rest of the site architecture. I want to use Wordpress to manage content for the rest of the site. I want to have sub-directories .co.uk/help/ and .co.uk/blog/, all managed from one Wordpress installation. Is this possible? If not, does having two separate installations of Wordpress create any speed issues? Additional question for bonus points from me; lets say I wanted to do away with sub-directories for the /help/ and /blog/ elements (but keep the /store/), could I have a Wordpress installation that doesn't generate a homepage (index.php) so I can utilise the e-commerce software version instead. Essentially I'd be installing Wordpress at the root folder, but wouldn't have an index.php made by Wordpress. Many thanks in advance
Web Design | | BlueTree_Sean0 -
What pluggin translator is the newest and the best to install on wordpress. Thank you very much
What pluggin translator is the newest and the best to install on wordpress. Thank you very much
Web Design | | maestrosonrisas0 -
404 page not found after site migration
Hi, A question from our developer. We have an issue in Google Webmaster Tools. A few months ago we killed off one of our e-commerce sites and set up another to replace it. The new site uses different software on a different domain. I set up a mass 301 redirect that would redirect any URLs to the new domain, so domain-one.com/product would redirect to domain-two.com/product. As it turns out, the new site doesn’t use the same URLs for products as the old one did, so I deleted the mass 301 redirect. We’re getting a lot of URLs showing up as 404 not found in Webmaster tools. These URLs used to exist on the old site and be linked to from the old sitemap. Even URLs that are showing up as 404 recently say that they are linked to in the old sitemap. The old sitemap no longer exists and has been returning a 404 error for some time now. Normally I would set up 301 redirects for each one and mark them as fixed, but there are almost quarter of a million URLs that are returning 404 errors, and rising. I’m sure there are some genuine problems that need sorting out in that list, but I just can’t see them under the mass of errors for pages that have been redirected from the old site. Because of this, I’m reluctant to set up a robots file that disallows all of the 404 URLs. The old site is no longer in the index. Searching google for site:domain-one.com returns no results. Ideally, I’d like anything that was linked from the old sitemap to be removed from webmaster tools and for Google to stop attempting to crawl those pages. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PASSLtd0 -
WordPress blog hosted on GoDaddy domain mapping help
We set up a WP blog that's hosted through GoDaddy. For various reasons, we purchased a URL to use to get through the technical build and set up and are trying to map that to a subdomain of our company website. (We can't host it on our own server, unfortunately). My question is: for WP blogs hosted via WP you can buy a domain mapping upgrade and I'm trying to find a similar plugin that could offer the same thing that would apply to our GoDaddy hosting and point to our subdomain (GD apparently doesn't offer the domain mapping). Anyone have any thoughts, please?
Web Design | | josh-riley0 -
Yahoo to Wordpress Permalinks
I have had a yahoo site for a couple of years. I want to start blogging so I had a worpress site built. After the site was build I noticed the urls from the previous site were not the same. For example www.besthomecaremn.com/about_us is now www.besthomecaremn.com/index-php/about_us. The company working on the site told me that that yahoo did not support permalinks and they could not make them match exactly. This is a problem because several of my pages rank differently for different terms: /about_us, /employees, /clients, /contact_us, etc, all rank differently. When they came up in the search results and were clicked on you were taken to the old site so it was like we had two sites. The company has now set that to send you to a page that says this page under routine maintenence. They are basically telling me they cannot make the urls for those pages stay the same. I am very frustrated and don't really know what to do at this point. Are they right? Can it really not be done? Can those pages alternatively be set to redirect to the new page urls or will that negatively affect the rank for those pages and how? Should I have them put the old site back up and swith hosting companies? Any advice on what to do in this situation is greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | AndreB0