Transferring a site to wordpress and its effect on SEO
-
I have a site that is hosted on a very old platform and would like to move it to WordPress. We are a surf shop and the summer months are the busiest for us. I want like to make sure that if I transfer my site that it won't hurt our rankings in any way. What would the best way of doing this be? i.e start building the WordPress site and once it is finished, point the domain to it? Will this have any ramifications for our rank? Thank you!
-
even after correctly redirecting it could take a few days to a few weeks to have your stable position back. So if your business would hurt extra in summer, do not move until after the season. (appart from the risk you are taking if you or your webbuilder does not have the experience to do this correctly)
-
Hey There
Kevin's got a lot of good tips. Here's some additional help:
-
If you are keeping the same domain (which it sounds like you are) I would
-
Build the new wordpress site on a test/dev server - you can use a spare domain name or hide it in a subdomain of your existing domain (just make sure to not let search engines find it)
-
When you are ready with it and happy, before launching - prepare redirects ahead of time
-
Then you can move the WordPress install to the root of your site domain
-
If your site is on www now, leave it that way (don't switch from www to non-www or vice versa)
-
Put the redirects in place and leave them there forever
-
Also, be sure to submit your new XML sitemap to webmaster tools (search console) and delete the old one
-
Watch search console for crawl errors and fix any that come up
You shouldn't hurt your rankings if this is all executed properly. Your URLs probably will change (thus needing redirects) but as Kevin said, try to keep your architecture the same (menus, footers etc).
-
-
When migrating a site to a new platform, try to maintain a similar site architecture and implement redirects. So if surfboard style 1 is on old site, create a new surfboard style 1 page on new site with same/similar content and redirect the old urls to the new ones. Also, take good baselines (organic positions, traffic and etc.) and watch your Google Search Console (webmaster tools) for any changes. For more information, see this guide.
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
-
how to set rel canonical on wordpress.com sites
I know how to do this with a wordpress.org site but I have a client that does not want to switch and without a plugin I am lost. any help would be greatly appreciated. Jeremy Wood
Technical SEO | | SOtBOrlando0 -
Site Map Problems or Are They?
According to webmaster tools my Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt Our site map is generically generated and encompasses all web pages, whether I have excluded them using the robots.txt file As far as I am aware this has never been an issue until recently. Is this hurting my rankings and how do I fix it? Secondly, webmaster tools says there is over 5,000 error/warnings on my site map. But site map is only 1,400 or so pages submitted. How do I see what is going on?
Technical SEO | | Professor0 -
Expressionengine SEO
One of my clients is using expressionengine CMS, and even the simplest things like creating unique page titles seem to be a nightmare. When I try to change page title via cms it also changes navigation menu. Any help will be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Thommas0 -
Transfer of website to maintain SEO
I am nearly finished building a new wordpress website to replace the old static HTML site which is currently doing very well in SERPs. My old site is currently hosted by a company who owns the site, my domain is registered with a different company and I have the nameservers pointed at Cloudflare. I have built my new site and have it hosted with a different company and I wish to keep the domain name registered with the company it is currently with.Is there an order that I should follow to move from the old site to the new site using my current domain name so that I minimize any impact on SEO. I built the new site with the same URL structure to maintain linking benefit. thanks
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
How to move a site slowly
I've got a site that I started back in 2001 (www.jaaroncaststone.com) to sell what I was making, concrete countertops and sinks. Well we're going to be discontinuing the concrete products in a month or so and want to start pointing all the links from the old site to a new one dedicated to a single product (www.jaaron-wood-countertops.com). I don't want to do a full 301 on the old site just yet but can I put a canonical tag on the index and about us pages pointing to the new site now so the search engines start looking that way or should I wait and do a full 301 when the day comes to pull the old site?
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
Replacing a site map
We are in the process of changing our folder/url structure. Currently we have about 5 sitemaps submitted to Google. How is it best to deal with these site maps in terms of either (a) replacing the old URLs with the new ones in the site map and (b) what affect should we have if we removed the site map submission from the Google Webmaster Tools console. Basically we have in the region of 20,000 urls to redirect to the new format, and to update in the site map.
Technical SEO | | NeilTompkins0 -
I have a WordPress site with 30 + categories and about 2k tags. I'd like to bring that number down for each taxonomy. What is the proper practice to do that?
I want to bring my categories down to about 8 or so and the tags... They're just a mess and I'd really like to bring that figure down significantly and setup a standard for usage. My thought was to remove the un-needed tags and categories and setup 301 redirects for the ones that I'm removing. Is that even necessary? Are there tools that can assist with this? What are the "gotchas" I should be aware of? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digisavvy1 -
Is IP-Hosting an effective and worthy SEO solution?
I have seen few websites selling same package of IP-Hosting, I consider that kind of smart SEO solution if it really be effective, But I have doubt. I have a few websites using a dedicated server for 6 years with only 1 valid IP and with that experience, I think rich content, title tags and anchor links are most important factors but I never tried such IP SEO, has any one tried IP hosting? Then comes second questions, If you have experienced and recommend IP Hosting, the reasonable application could be wordpress to manage all the sites in diffrent servers, and by using plugins such as autoblog or RSS importer we can update all the sites with minimum effort, But the problem is that neither of these 2 plugins are really working hassle free, They do not work at all or they stop wroking all the sudden, preferably I need a solution for Wordpress multisite Would you offer any alternative? I appreciate if you share your ideas... P.S.: My objective to apply IP hosting is not geo-targeting I use to launch .COMs normally without any particular geo-target.
Technical SEO | | Pooria0