Transfer of Statistics and information to new website
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Hi, we are planning on transferring our statistics for this website to a new website which is self hosted through WordPress. In a few weeks we would also like to transfer the domain from the temp domain on that website, to the new website. How can we do this? As well as this, we feel we get a lot of views from search engines, we wouldn’t want that to stop whilst creating our new website. How do we go about this? Many thanks, Ryan
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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We can transfer your stats for you. What are the URLs of the sites you’re transferring from/to?
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The website we are moving from is dictatethegame.com to dtgwriters.com, however we will be repurchasing the original domain when we can so we just need the stats
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Thanks, do you want us to go ahead and merge the stats now? I was confused about this part too:
“we will be repurchasing the original domain” — the domain dictatethegame.com is active currently. Do you mean to point it to the new host instead, or transfer the registration? I strongly recommend against trying to cancel and repurchase. Just note it’s currently owned by another account.
To address this:
As well as this, we feel we get a lot of views from search engines, we wouldn’t want that to stop whilst creating our new website. How do we go about this? Many thanks, Ryan
My biggest tip there is to export and import your content into the new site. Don’t change the URL structure. Avoid the temptation to delete a bunch of content. If you do delete something that gets lots of hits, be sure to ask your host for help redirecting it to the new content.
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If you merged the stats, would we lose the ones on DictateTheGame as we are still publishing there?
I didn’t mean repurchasing, sorry I am not the most technical when it comes to this. I own both the new domain and DictateTheGame, so what we want to do, when we are ready to go live, is when someone searches DictateTheGame it will redirect them to our new self hosted website and not the current website we have.
I tried to export and import, but it created problems and with the ability to use SEO and readability now, we are manually transferring articles across, and then publishing them so we can adjust them to make them better for google searches. I just don’t want to be at the bottom of the pile, as we get some really good views and good google rankings currently.
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If you merged the stats, would we lose the ones on DictateTheGame as we are still publishing there?
It won’t be lost, but new views you get after the merge won’t automatically go to the new site as well.
so what we want to do, when we are ready to go live, is when someone searches DictateTheGame it will redirect them to our new self hosted website and not the current website we have.
Do you plan for dictatethegame.com to be the main domain on the new site? In that case I’d recommend you still hold off a bit on moving the stats.
You currently have the new site connected to Jetpack under the domain, dtgwriters.com. That should be fine if you then later add dictatethegame.com to the site, but should you ever need to disconnect and reconnect Jetpack, it will cause a completely new Jetpack connection to be created at the primary address, and that will make it seem like stats will reset. They won’t actually, but they’ll be attached to the old Jetpack connection, rather than the new one.
So the better sequence of steps here would be to finish your migration, move the old domain to the new site, reconnect Jetpack so the correct domain is attached to the Jetpack connection, and then transfer your stats and followers as the last step.
The merged stats anyway won’t show if the content is not yet on the new site.
I tried to export and import, but it created problems and with the ability to use SEO and readability now, we are manually transferring articles across,
Importing should not cause any issues with SEO. The WordPress importer ports across all meta data associated with posts, and if you use the same domain and the same permalink structure on the new site, search engines won’t even have to re-index your content. Even if they do, at most you’ll see a temporary dip in search engine traffic for a few weeks before it recovers naturally.
On the other hand, manually transferring stuff can cause SEO issues – if in the process you publish posts with different dates or URL slugs, that’s going to cause 404 errors with the links currently indexed with Google, and it can take several months for Google to re-index the site in that case, no matter what you do on your end in terms of SEO optimization.
If you plan on having the new site at the same dictatethegame.com domain you have now, I’d also recommend you hide the new site from search engines for now, until you’re ready to switch that domain over.
Otherwise what’s going to happen is Google and others are going to start indexing the new site at the dtgwriters.com domain, and then will have to re-index everything once you add the other domain. Then there’s also the issue of duplicate content between the two sites at the moment.
You mention readability, so I’m guessing you’re using Yoast on the new site? If so, I wouldn’t worry about that for existing posts. Those are already indexed by search engines, and already ranking well according to your comment above. So don’t mess with them. Use Yoast’s tools to optimize your new content, by all means, but I think with existing posts you’re trying to fix a problem that isn’t really there, and making more work for yourself than you need to.
That’s a mouthful, so let me know if anything is unclear :)
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Hi, thanks for the reply. Sorry for the delay in response, been really busy our end.
We are currently in the process of transferring our domain to the new website where we can then transfer our stats, if possible at the earliest stage when it goes live. We hope to get the new website on the domain by the end of today. The problem is, none of us are developers so all the technical side isn’t as good as we want it to be – but that’s not that big an issue. I am sure when it all goes live, we won’t be worrying about the little things.
We expect to have a dip in views, which is to be expected, because it’s a brand new website and essentially fresh and doesn’t exist. Another issue is GoogleAds, we are still waiting to be accepted for that, so were being held back by that, but that’s not a WordPress issue.
Thanks for the advice about transferring articles, we have tried to mimic the slugs so that we don’t lose out on views or lead people to dead end websites like you said.
Again, I appreciate your response. Hopefully my response makes sense, but if not, I apologise.
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Your reply makes complete sense :)
Please let us know here once you’ve connected the domain and reconnected Jetpack, and then we can transfer the stats for you.
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The domain went live yesterday, and I have just disconnected and reconnected JetPack. It should be fine to transfer the stats, whenever you can. Let me know if there’s anything else we can do!
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Hi there,
I have successfully transferred your statistics to your new site.
Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you. I’m happy to help.
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Hi,
Thank you. Only issue is, we’ve lost all our stats from yesterday and today when we launched. Missing at least 500 views today and a lot yesterday. Can they be combined or is that us lost a days views? Thanks
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Was Jetpack connected to your WordPress.com account for that period? If it wasn’t then those stats couldn’t have been recorded.
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