Moving your site to another theme, anyone done it?

[AidanLCFC]

Looking for a bit of advice please as I'm looking to migrate a site but not sure the best way to go about it. Got one site I want to move from a manual HTML set up to using a wordpress theme and CMS. What's the best way to go about moving the site please? I've never done it before but want to give it a go

 

[baldidiot]

Yeah loads of times. We used to do a bunch of static html and basic php stuff back in the day - it's fast, no worries about updates or cms vunerabilities... problem is it's not that user friendly for content managers etc.. so had to switch. Also converted from joomla and so on after that went downhill.

Best way of doing it depends how big the site is and how the data is currently laid out. You can get plug ins that help with this kind of thing. Tbh if it's a small site you're probably faster just copy and pasting.

You can also probably hire people pretty cheaply to do it.

How big is the site? You keeping it exactly the same or using it as an opportunity to rejig things?

 

[bonustreak]

We hired from Guru to get this done for us, takes way too much time otherwise.

 

[ddm]

@aidan

- 301s - old urls to new urls [.htaccess]
- add a sitemaps plugin
+ tell google [change of site address, new sitemap] via search console.

[for extra sanity, sign up for ahrefs for a week (good headless site audit tool). or use screaming frog, to make sure everything is in order]

 

[AidanLCFC]

thanks for the answers guys. anyone got on recommendations of people who'd be able to do this at all please?

 

[AidanLCFC]

Yeah loads of times. We used to do a bunch of static html and basic php stuff back in the day - it's fast, no worries about updates or cms vunerabilities... problem is it's not that user friendly for content managers etc.. so had to switch. Also converted from joomla and so on after that went downhill.

Best way of doing it depends how big the site is and how the data is currently laid out. You can get plug ins that help with this kind of thing. Tbh if it's a small site you're probably faster just copy and pasting.

You can also probably hire people pretty cheaply to do it.

How big is the site? You keeping it exactly the same or using it as an opportunity to rejig things?

About 200 pages mate. Going to be rejigging a little bit to fit the theme

 

[Jetman]

Hi Aidan,

What you could do is use localwp to create and change the site locally (on your pc), before changing everything in realtime. You have less downtime, and you can check everything beforehand for errors etc. I think they even have a service that allows you to migrate the site back without much hassle. In any case, good luck. I get sweathy hands thinking about changing templates for sites that are already ranking.

 

[ddm]

i would imagine someone could probably write a script to do all the donkey work for this. - scrape the site, create WP pages / posts dynamically containing all the relevant data and metadata [depends on the source pages and how they are structured.. it would assume consistency in the page templates in order to be viable plan ]

 

[baldidiot]

The other question to ask yourself is whether you're planning on converting as is - ie: so the WP site looks and is laid out the same way as the current html site - or if you're wanting to change the style of the site?

Tbh it's not complicated if you're just talking about moving the content over, should be able to find loads of people that can do it. All you need is someone that won't make a pigs ear of it. You could probably even find someone uber cheap on fiverr.

Having said that, if you want additional functionality - such as custom post types, custom fields, shortcodes etc.. you'd probably be better off spending a little more and getting a proper dev to do it. Codeable.io is good for better quality devs.

 

[TTR]

manual HTML is the best imho

 

[AussieDave]

Personally, it depends on age of domain, and other factors too. Way back in 2009 when I started using WP, I moved a couple of static html sites over to WP. One actually ranked better after. However the money site didn't. It hit the shit skids and took literally 12 months to come good again. I'd seriously think wise and hard if this site has longivity as a static HTML site, and if it's your money site. Your rankings could plummet!