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 architecture? I've got a free user report, that shoots back a page with their data for them to share with co-workers and friends.
Hi, I have a site about to go online that users can run a free report that connects to their calendar app to get 12 months of statistics for their meetings, and then it shoots out a report. So they go to a.com/freereport and they get back a.zom/freereport/report/xxxxxx The content of those reports is different, but the structure is the same as it is a fun way to show off meeting stats to co-workers and friends. I don't see the point of Google indexing those as the traffic to those pages is going to be from social networks and viral, but I do want the backlink credit. Will I get backlink credit if I nofollow that folder? I am having a hard time deciding what to do seo wise and would love some thoughts and advice, what would you recommend? Do nothing fancy. Mark the report folder no follow. Try to do something with rel=cannonical to point those pages to the root page? Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | bwb0 -
301 Re-directing 'empty' domains
Hello, My client had purchased a few domains and 301 re-directed them, pointing to our main website. As far as I am aware the 'empty domains' are brand related but no content has ever been displayed on them, and I doubt they have much authority. The issue here is that we took a dive in ranking for our main keyword, I had a look on ahrefs and found the below: | www.empty-domain/our-keyword | 30 | 19 | 1 | fb 0
Technical SEO | | SO_UK
G+ 0
in 4 | REDIRECT 301 TO www.main-domain/our-keyword | 8 Feb '175 d | The ranking dip happened at the same time as the re-direct was re-discovered / re-crawled. Could the 'empty' URL in question been causing us any issues? I understand that this is terrible practice for 301 redirects, I was hoping someone in the community could shed light on any possible solution for this.0 -
Rank a site that was 301'd
We had a customer that had 2 sites. They left us, and 301'd site A to site B. Things didn't go well. Now, a year later they want to use us again. Ideally, I would undo the 301. Has anyone done this? Would I be better off starting with a new domain? If you've done it, how long before it started to rank like you expected/hoped?
Technical SEO | | TimColeman0 -
Why would this site outrank a Pr2 site with higher domain authority?
I am trying to get a pr2 site to be on top 7 local spot for the keyword Van Nuys Bail bonds but have discovered a site which has barely any back links and is not even a year old on top results. Their backlinks are from lower authority domains than what we have. How could this site be beating a 7 year old pr2 website? The site I'm working on is http://bbbail.com/ The site that is ranking in 5th spot local with pr0 is http://www.vipbailbonds.org/ is it maybe because it is a .org site? Also I notice that all websites in top spots have www, could that be a factor as well?
Technical SEO | | jesse13410 -
I have a mobile version and a standard version of my website. I'd like to show users some pages on the non-mobile site but keep googlebot mobile out. Is that ok?
On the mobile version not all the content of the normal site is available to the users. Since we didn't want googlebot mobile to index the non-mobile site, all the non-existent pages were returned with a 404 error. But now we'd like to show the mobile users these pages and send them to the normal site. If we allow the users to see these pages, is it ok to block googlebot mobile so these non-mobile pages are not indexed by googlebot mobile or will that create some issues for google?
Technical SEO | | bgs0 -
301ing 404's
Hey guys, I am currently in the process of redirecting some of my 404 pages to pages like my home page. Before I do that, I am assessing the link value of the 404 pages. My question is what do you do with the 404 pages which appear to have low quality links, do you really want to redirect them to an important page on your site? What should I do with these 404 pages? CheersAdam
Technical SEO | | Adamshowbiz0 -
What's our easiest, quickest "win" for page load speed?
This is a follow up question to an earlier thread located here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/we-just-fixed-a-meta-refresh-unified-our-link-profile-and-now-our-rankings-are-going-crazy In that thread, Dr. Pete Meyers said "You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files." Our IT Director is willing to spend time working on this, but he believes it is a complicated process because each script must be evaluated to determine which ones are needed "pre" page load and which ones can be loaded "post." Our IT Director went on to say that he believes the quickest "win" we could get would be to move our SSL javascript for our SSL icon (in our site footer) to an internal page, and just link to that page from an image of the icon in the footer. He says this javascript, more than any other, slows our page down. My question is two parts: 1. How can I verify that this javascript is indeed, a major culprit of our page load speed? 2. Is it possible that it is slow because so many styles have been applied to the surrounding area? In other words, if I stripped out the "Secured by" text and all the syles associated with that, could that effect the efficiency of the script? 3. Are there any negatives to moving that javascript to an interior landing page, leaving the icon as an image in the footer and linking to the new page? Any thoughts, suggestions, comments, etc. are greatly appreciated! Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Does using Google Loader's ClientLocation API to serve different content based on region hurt SEO?
Does using Google Loader's ClientLocation API to serve different content based on region hurt SEO? Is there a better way to do what I'm trying to do?
Technical SEO | | Ocularis0