Are you moving your WordPress blog or website to a new URL or hosting provider? If so, I’m going to explore how to achieve ~80% of the work with 3 quick tips.
I’m preparing to relaunch and rebrand the MatthewM.org blog. I plan on expanding the readership, contributors and overall quality of this site. I need to make sure I move all of my past posts and important links to the new blog correctly to ensure the plan goes accordingly. In my adventures of preparing for this – I’ve stumbled across a few plugins and methods that I feel will be beneficial to you.
Let’s take a look.
What we are learning
- Migrating your WordPress blog or website
- Built-in import and export feature
- Link management plugins
WordPress Built-in Import/Export Of Data
This should be your first stop to moving your WordPress website or blog. Export the data in .xml format, login to your new blog, and import the data. This will import your posts, pages, info, and pull down the images from your old site.
This does not import the database itself or other plugin information – think of it as forklifting all the raw data you have created.
The Redirection Plug-in
If you’re moving your site and structure entirely, this is a must have to keep your links consistant.
Example: your old site had an “about” page at http://<site>/about but on your new site, it’s at http://<site>/about-me. Use this plugin to redirect your visitors to the correct page without getting the pesky 404 not found.
Broken Links Plug-in
Here is another plugin to have in your arsenal of managing links. The broken link plugin will scan your WordPress site for any links that are – you guessed it – broken!
If you have links to images, articles or videos in your posts that are no longer working – this will track them down and notify you. From the interface, you can correct the broken link.
Using the redirect and broken link plugins together are a perfect combination.
That Was Easy
So there you have it, up to 80% of the challenges of migrating your WordPress blog solved with 3 simple tips. You move your data, text, and photos with the import/export tool, you redirect old pages/posts to new URL’s, and you check for anything that broke along the way with the broken link plug-in.
Of course there are some other hurdles you may encounter.
Migrating comments and other plugin data will not come along with this move. You would need to take those on a case by case basis.
Let me know what you think or if you have any tips for the rest of us!
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