New version of existing website

  • Unknown's avatar
    thesteelpen · Member ·

    I have inherited a website hosted with another service. It was created from scratch by an old guy who’s too old to care for it anymore, and I’m creating a new version in WordPress. (the site is a world-class resource for collectors and so is very worth saving)

    Right now the old site is still up, using the domain while I build the new version. I’m using a free WordPress subdomain, marked Private, and once the site is in shape I’ll roll it out, and transfer the domain, thus shutting down the old site.

    I have two questions.
    1. I want to make sure that my new site, which has a lot of internal links, will work once I transfer the existing domain.
    2. The internal links in the old site will no longer work once I’ve rolled out the new site. I’m wondering how I can ensure that any attempts to visit a URL on the old site which won’t exist, will redirect them to a page which tells them to try the main page of the new site (which is a table of contents). Or, if it’s possible to map the old URL’s to the new URL’s? The old URL’s are based on the original documents he built his original site off of, and so have “%20″‘s in them. In the new site the URL’s make more sense.

    As I build the new site I want to make sure I’m aware of any potential gotchas. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • fstat · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    I’m happy to help with those questions.

    1. Yes, it will work. We will automatically redirect all the traffic from the free subdomain to your domain.

    2. This should be possible. You’ll have to be on the Business plan though and use a redirect plugin like Safe Redirect Manager:

    Safe Redirect Manager

    Please note that you’ll need to manually add a redirection for each link. For links that are not redirected, the visitor will be presented with a 404 page. You can customize that page to inform the visitors to use the built-in search function to find the article they’re looking for.

    If you have any other questions, just let me know and I’ll be happy to help.

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