Blog migration – how easy was it?

First up an apology: I had intended to post an in depth sequence of learning guiding you through my migration experience and sharing all my lessons learned. I wanted to show you how careful you have to be with WordPress so as not to accidentally lose all your content. I wanted to make sure no-one else had to worry before upgrading their hosting. My new location for my Doctor Who blog is now Red Rocket Rising.

In actual fact it was pretty simple and mostly just worked. For what it’s worth here is what I did.

Before

I had already sorted out hosting and started a new blog on my own domain so the technicalities of running up WordPress and tuning it were already sorted. I set-up a sub=domain as a test area and migrated my whole blog (around 170 posts and around 250 images). I imported it fine and then started testing.

The content was fine, internal links were not but there is a plugin to fix that (I used Velvet Blues Update URLs) so no real problem.

I had to find a set of plug-ins to mimic features I wanted from the old WordPress.com which I mostly managed and will post separately on. I found the theme writer had a much newer version of the theme I had been using and installed that. Some tweaks later it was more than adequate.

I then added a couple of new things to make it better as that was the main reason for moving after all! That all done I was ready to go.

During

I just re-migrated to a new instance of WordPress on the new domain name. I reapplied the URL tweak, checked all the posts were there, it seemed to work so I then went back to wordpress.com, made the old blog private and paid for a year’s redirection ($13).

After

It takes a few days for Google to spot the new page addresses. I am very happy with the move, I have a better blog, I have tweaked some CSS and seem to get more traffic though it is early days and some of it may be robots and crawlers.

The only issue I have had is that a lot of images seemed to move but didn’t. I have, so far, had to re-import around 40% of my images either from the old blog, which is still there for back-up, or from source.

Overall though a positive change and well recommended!

 

Have you moved a blog? What were your experiences? Are you about to move and have questions? Let me know!