Migrating a site to Wordpress

[Jon-C]

I've recently been converting our old website to a wordpress based website and been working on the new version of the site on a subdomain.

Now at the stage when I am getting ready to let the site go live and just wondering exactly how to do this so I have minimal downtime?

Looking in the wordpress control panel there is the setting to enter the address of the site if you want it to be different from the directory it has been installed within - is this a good idea (i.e. is it stable if I do this? good for seo, bad for seo or makes no difference?)?

or should I manually install everything in the root myself (if I do this is there a way to direct people to the temp version of the site on the subdomain?

Any tips, do and don't s would be appreciated as I want to do this right!

[akhlis]

Okay so let say this:

You have installed your new site at:

www.newsite.example.com

• Open phpmyadmin (or any other MySql editor) and locate the link above inside the option table. IMGHERE
• Edit that row to match your domain (installation folder EX: www.example.com)
• Copy all the content how is to the new location (root)
• Go to THIS LINK and learn how to edit your wp-config file
• And you are done

Depending how fast you can act and how fast your server is, this steps can be made under 30 seconds.

[PaulRonin]

If your unfamiliar with your hosting console you may want to test the process before you actually follow through with it.  Or plan to do it super early or super late in the day to minimize downtime if you hit a snag.  There are so many different hosting consoles and possibilities that are impossible to cover here.

I'm going to make the assumption that your host will allow you to redirect a domain to a different folder.

so:  www.example.com  -points to ->  /htdocs

and dev.example.com -points to -> /dev

In the past I typically just use the wordpress console to make the change under the general settings to the correct domain(note this will break the wordpress for the moment on the development domain dev.example.com).  I then redirect my primary URL(www.example.com) to the folder I'm using for the development domain.

IF your host doesn't allow this, there are other options besides changing the data at the database level within PHPmyadmin.  If your comfortable with PHPMyAdmin then go for it.  Either way it wouldn't hurt to setup dev2.example.com and follow thru the process just to test things out and know the steps before you break anything.

Good Luck!

[Jon-C]

Thanks both, I'll probably try the redirecting of a folder but I shall test it all first on a new folder just to be on the safe side - to be honest the testing on a different folder never even crossed my mind (why did I not think of that!)

Thank you!

Ted

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

Paul's right, it's going to be impossible to suggest exactly how to do this, since there's several nuanced steps that could be involved.

This is by far the best resource to follow if you're doing it by hand.

There are some plugins and third party sites like Manage WP  (which I used once with success) that can help too.

Once the WordPress site is up and live, you'll want to crawl it to look for broken links. The biggest thing is making sure all the old URLs redirect to the new ones.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

[Jon-C]

Cheers Dan,

Once it's live I will be double, triple, quadruple checking everything! Paranoid I will miss something or do something wrong!

Planning on doing it when I've a lot of time to spare just to be on safe side in case things go wrong!

I shall give the plugin a go as well I think.

Thanks

Ted