When dealing with new web design clients, one topic that crops up regularly is how we can migrate content from an old website system in to a new platform such as WordPress.
As with many web development tasks, there are many ways to address the challenge of moving all of your content, files and images to a new website platform – and potentially a new web server, too. We take a look at the options available to businesses wanting to move their website to WordPress – a process known as migration.
Why move to WordPress?
There are a number of good reasons to move your website to WordPress:
- Moving to WordPress can potentially reduce your ongoing website support costs by allowing you to manage a lot of your own website’s content
- Migrating can also save on potentially expensive license fees for proprietary content management systems – WordPress is free to use, open source software
- Your staff are already familiar with the WordPress platform
We love WordPress at Peacock Carter for providing a solid base for building all variety of websites, from simple brochure websites, to ecommerce websites and membership databases.
Of course, before we begin – if you’re attempting this yourself, please make sure you back up files and database of your previous website before attempting anything!
1. Migrate your website manually – copy and pasting!
This is one – very painstaking and slow – way to move your website to WordPress, and we wouldn’t recommend it! Copy-and-pasting your website’s content in to a new WordPress installation is one way to migrate your website, but it’s a potentially long and painful experience.
Copy-and-pasting your website is prone to introducing errors in to your content, and you may miss content that isn’t publicly visible (such as draft content which hasn’t been posted yet) doing it this way.
2. Use a WordPress migration plugin
WordPress is open source software and is also free to use, and supported by a huge worldwide community who contribute extra features you can add to your website, known as “plugins”.
Some plugins are definitely better than others, but we highly recommend the WP All Import plugin if you’re going to attempt it yourself – it makes it about as easy as it can be to migrate even larger websites to WordPress. No plugin can deal with every content import situtation, though, so you may find limitations in even the premium plugins which call for a little help from a WordPress developer.
3. Ask the WordPress experts
Peacock Carter have migrated countless websites to WordPress since we started in 2006, from custom built content management systems, to Drupal, Weebly, Wix and Shopify. Each platform comes with its own challenges when migrating to WordPress, and as experienced web developers, we can work with you to solve them.
If you’d like to discuss your WordPress website migration project, please contact us.