Advice on upgrading from Joomla V1.5.17 to latest

[IsaCleanse]

Hi there

Ive recently taken on managing www.wetspotcharters.com.au and to my horror after eventually finding a way to log into the back end I've found out that its running Joomla version 1.5.17

Would anyone have any advice as to how to upgrade this to latest version or preferably, migrate the site to Wordpress without losing much of its current look and feel (which will eventually be replaced one page at a time)

Thank you in advance

[Highland]

Have you looked at the docs? They have an article about how to migrate from 1.5 to 3.x

https://docs.joomla.org/Joomla_1.5_to_3.x_Step_by_Step_Migration

If you've not done it before I would suggest using a migration service (just Google for Joomla migration). You're less likely to run into showstopping issues. For a long lived website I'd pay for the service just to have peace of mind.

[Mobilio]

I just crawl your site with desktop crawler and found that you have just 67 internal HTML files. I know that there is export from Joomla and import to WP but in reality things wasn't as advertised. So here is mine idea:

1. Keep actual Joomla as-is for now
2. Make copy of site with some web site saver - TeleportPro, Site Sucker, etc. As backup just for sure.
3. Create new WP, setup SEO, GA, silo structure. Do this on internal server.
4. Creating pages with "nice" URLs, make 301 redirects from old pages to new one in .htaccess
5. Copy-paste content from saved site to WP, make titles, meta description and SEO images (alt, title, etc).
6. Create internal links between page again. Make onpage SEO for pages and links.
7. Trash Joomla.
8. Move WP from internal server to public one. Copy .htaccess redirects too.
9. Check for errors, check web log files for erros, etc.
10. That's all!

Timeframe for this will be few days (up to 6 if you process 10 pages in single day). Almost same time you will lost with migration from 1.5 to 3.X. But i will suggest you to migrate to WP because there process for migration is almost one click compared to Joomla. I don't know why Joomla didn't make easy process for updating their customers to new versions... and i was few times upset with that.

[Xtend-Life]

I have worked a lot with Joomla 1.5, you will need to upgrade 1.5 to I think 1.7 first then you should be able to go to 3.

But, upgrading from 1.5 is going to be an absolute nightmare - do not waste your time. I HIGHLY recommend just transferring everything over to Wordpress, try find a template from themeforest which is similar to your site, it will save you so much trouble.