Support » Fixing WordPress » Upgrading to New Site, need best practice advice

  • Hi,

    We are getting ready to launch a completely new site design. Many of our old pages and even the structure of our blog is now totally different (and hopefully more SEO compliant) and I am looking for advice on the best practices to cut over to this new site with minimal damage to our existing page ranks in Google.

    Thanks.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • Since no one has answered I will give one thought. add 301 redirects to the top level .htaccess file to redirect incoming requests for old URL’s to the new URL. You may need one redirect per page. It may be a lot of work to set them up but it preserves all your old links. When it finds 301’s Google will update the old URL to the new URL. And the redirects keeps the link alive for anyone who has bookmarked a page in the old site, old links from other sites, etc.

    redirect 301 /about.php http://domain.com/newwpsite/about/

    Thread Starter snapshotz

    (@snapshotz)

    Hi stvwlf,

    Thanks for the reply.

    So if I understand this correctly…we will replace the existing site with our new site (the domain name is not changing) and for any pages that the slug/urls have now changed (including our blog posts I assume) then we need to add a 301 entry in the .htaccess file for every individual page not matching – correct?

    Will doing this hurt our SEO? Will it help?

    Thank you.

    The search engines will begin to index the new site and the new SEO. Using the .htaccess 301 redirects will tell the search engines to redirect and look at the new location for the page.

    Since the search engines have previously indexed the old urls, if you do not do the 301 redirects, you will take a big hit with broken links (404 errors) the 301 redirects will keep that from happening. Then the new pages will be re-indexed by the search engines.

    Yes. a 301 redirect for each individual page.

    I am not a redirect expert. I do know that with using regular expressions, assuming that the name is the same for the individual posts, you could do a single statement that would redirect to the new canonical path. But if there is no consistent patterns (one old sub-directory or category now included in a new category) then doing it individually is probably the best.

    If you have hundreds of articles, then you might want to think about the programmed re-direct. If you have less than a hundred, you can probably copy-paste the old/new paths per line.

    One other thing. Remember, it is the old path that is the problem. So, make sure that ALL old paths are included, even if many of them go to a default page. In other words, if you have left out some of your old articles, redirect them to a default page, like the front page, so that the indexes to not hit a 404.

    Hi – I agree with all that amackley said. To expand a little on what he meant by programmed redirect, if you have hundreds of pages to redirect.

    I did one site that way, programmatically creating a custom field for each post. The custom field contained the post’s previous URL. I think I started with a spreadsheet of 2 cols, old URL and new URL and probably found a little routine to locate the new page permalink and add a custom field of the matching URL.

    I directed Apache to make the WordPress top level index.php the 404 handler. When a 404 page came in it triggered a function that did a lookup to see if an old URL custom field matching the 404’s URL existed in the database. If it did it got the permalink of the corresponding post and did a PHP 301 redirect to the new page. If not found, continue with regular WP 404 handling.

    I agree with amackley that around 100 manual redirects is the cutoff. If you have 130, sure they can all be manual. But if you have 150, 300, more, worth creating a WP old URL redirect system.

    If your pages turn up as 301 redirect Google will move its links to the new URL.

    Thread Starter snapshotz

    (@snapshotz)

    Thanks a lot for all the info guys. This will be a great help.

    With our new design we have taken a lot of care to achieve better SEO with our directory/folder names, image names and our blog slugs. Hopefully we will be successful.

    There isn’t a plugin that does this??
    Asking as I am just starting the conversion of a static html to WP.

    @dragonsjaw: Not sure what part you want a plugin to do.

    How would a WP plugin know the URL’s of the pages on your old site and what pages on the new site each old URL is to link to?

    Approx how many static HTML pages are in your current site?

    There are plugins that help you achieve better SEO, but when you are converting pages, as stvwlf mentioned, the previous pages are on a completely different server/database.

    There is a plugin called redirection, which will help you do this. It provides a GUI so that you can put in the old filepath/filename to the new filepath/filename. However, each file has to be done individually.

    The .htaccess file is still much simpler, and it does not require the additional code that the Redirection plugin would require. The .htaccess file operates at the server level and is very efficient.

    stvwlf added the code that is simple to add. You can copy and paste many files into the .htaccess file very quickly. I have done this before and it is very efficient.

    Aaron Mackley

    for .htaccess file:

    redirect 301 /about.php http://domain.com/newsite/about/

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • The topic ‘Upgrading to New Site, need best practice advice’ is closed to new replies.