How to move blog to new domain with different theme & categories

[stephenfishman]

I have a wordpress blog hosted on a separate domain.  I have a new empty blog on a subdomain of my-commerce  main site. The new blog has a different wordpress theme & categories than the old blog.

What is a good way to populate the new blog with content from the old?

What do I do with the old blog once the move is done?

Thank you for your thoughts on this

Handcrafter

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

This should be fairly easy as it's Wordpress to Wordpress. Does this page answer the question properly for you? https://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content

You will want to 301 redirect the old blog to the new one once you are done, ensuring that this is done on a page by page basis (e.g. www.oldblog.com/post123.html redirects to blog.newdomaincom/post123.html).

You will probably need to do this in your .htaccess file if the site is hosted on an Apache server. It will probably look like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[stephenfishman]

Thank you Jane-

Can you tell me what the "Options +FollowSymLinks" is for?

And by the way, after everything is 301'd would you keep the old site hosted forever?

Best wishes

Stephen

[JaneCopland]

Hi Stephen,

That's part of the syntax used to transfer a site URL-by-URL - what the entire snippet of code means is that a browser or search engine will come across www.oldblog.com/post123.html and immediately be taken to blog.newdomaincom/post123.html. If you are not using the same URLs on the new blog, you won't need to or be able to use this particular function in your .htaccess file.

You say that "the new blog has a different wordpress theme & categories than the old blog" which makes me think you'll need to redirect category URLs separately at least (I must have missed that line when I read the question at first; apologies).

Once you've redirected everything, you will need to keep the old domain. If you let it lapse or sell it, the redirects will no longer work unfortunately.