Combining sites
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I have a site which has been running for eight years using Expression Web 4 which has not been supported since 2010 and is showing its age. There does not seem to be any easy way of migrating EW4 pages to WordPress but as this is a theatre review, features and news site, apart from a few info pages, the pages are archive material.
Now as hosting and registration of the site have been paid for several years with GoDaddy I don’t want to lose money by moving hosting, but obviously would want to keep my existing domain name.
So is it possible to use the domain on WordPress, effectively transferring the front end and all new pages to WordPress linking, as HTML links, to former pages and their indexes as an archive? Many theatre sites have links to past reviews while many amateur theatre companies use past reviews as both their own archives and as a reference so I cannot afford to lose them.
Just looking for advice.The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi @behindthearras, can you send a link to the existing site? That will give us a better idea of what’s possible.
Typically you would want to try to keep your links as similar as possible so that folks who have old links can easily find the content’s new location.
Also, I should say that since you already have GoDaddy hosting, you could consider installing WordPress.org there. We aren’t able to provide support for it, since it’s free software instead of a service, but do know that’s an option that’s available to you. More info here:
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Hi,
Site is http://www.behindthearras.com which started off small and has just grown and grown so need to get it back under control and with better displays on mobiles and tablets. -
Hi @behindthearras, that makes sense.
Are you worried about keeping your existing SEO / links? For example, if someone clicked on this:
http://www.behindthearras.com/reviewsam/reviewsAMAugDec2016/black-coffee-review-dudley-DL09-16.html
You could carefully copy that page’s content into a similar address on this server, but the address you have is quite strange. So unless you did copy it over exactly in that path, the user would get a “not found” error on that page.
Is that okay?
If so, you’ll just want to start slowly copying and pasting the articles here.
If it isn’t okay, you’ll probably want to get your own copy of WordPress at your current host, copy the content over, then ask the host to help you make a redirect for each broken page link.
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The problem is that there are about 1,600 pages, plus associated pictures, videos and albums, in all 16,551 files, representing more than seven years reviews. The URLs are fairly simple filing in that http://www.behindthearras.com/reviewsam/reviewsAMAugDec2016/black-coffee-review-dudley-DL09-16.html is a review of the play Black Coffee at Dudley Little Theatre in September 2016, which is in the folder for August to December 2016 which in turn is the the amateur reviews folder making it easy to find if necessary.
Now reviews are found either by their URL, and many theatres and companies have links to them on their own sites, or from index pages – two professional, A_Z and Theatre, two amateur, the same and one features.
Would it not be possible to retain the existing reviews as an archive with new index pages labelled them as 2009-2016 archive – I am hoping to redesign for the end of the year – with the existing links continuing as they are with no modification and then with new reviews being written in WordPress with a new archive being created.
We can’t afford to lose the links, and certainly can’t afford the time to copy 1,600 pages over. We have become a site of record and reference and cannot afford to lose that distinction.
If that is not possible we will have to look at another solution. -
@behindthearras You’ll have a few issues to deal with here:
1) Importing static HTML & files
2) Creating redirects for each HTML file to point to the new URL on your WordPress installation, so you don’t lose all of those links folks have out there.
As you’ve pointed out, it would be too much work to copy it all over, but you can’t afford to lose those links, either. And our service doesn’t have a great way to handle either of these issues, since we don’t have an HTML importer or a means to redirect individual URLs.
That said, you can probably find a way to do it with the WordPress.org software, which you can install at your existing host — it’s just not something we could support here. There are HTML importers plugins available, and if those didn’t work, you could hire a developer to do the import and 301 redirects for you programmatically, especially since you’ve been pretty consistent with your URL naming schemes and what not. You can find help for WordPress.org installations at https://wordpress.org/support , or you could find someone in your local community to recommend a developer for you: https://wordpress.meetup.com .
Best wishes!
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