Hello I need to switch from wordpress to joomla, the wordpress site ranks pretty well, so im wondering if it would mess up all my rankings when i switch to joomla? Any other info i would need to know on doing this process? Im going to be doing this tonight, please any help would be appreciated Thanks in advance
Anytime you make changes to your website, you will run the risk of hurting your SERP, especially major changes such as switching the software that is used to manage your website. The biggest area of concern that comes to mind is, current backlinks that are linking to your website. If you have backlinks that are linked to URL's that will be gone after the switch, then your SERP will definitely be effected. The switch may have a negative effect on your SEPR at first, but with proper internal and external SEO, your website may be better off in the future.
If you can keep all your urls intact, the impact will be minimal. However, if most of your urls are changed, you need to plan ahead to ensure the redirects are properly done. Otherwise, you may lose rankings and traffic. If you don't have a lot of pages, that is easy to have 301 redirects. However, if the site is huge, make sure that the most important pages have redirects done first.
the wordpress site didnt have many pages only like 7, so would i just 301 those links to the home page of the joomla site, or to those acual pages in the joomla site?. most of my backlinks are pointing to the homepage
Going from wordpress to joomla is a bad idea in the first place. Its like going from a BMW to a Hyundai. Nigel
You can do this in a way that minimises damage to your ranking. You need to use redirects to direct all the old URLs to the new domain. Notting
Like MPLS said, either you need to recover your URL's (recreate them using Joomla) or you need to 301 redirect them to the new pages (the internal pages in Joomla, NOT the homepage). Google is really good about changing URL's when using a 301, just make sure the new pages have identical or near identical content if you want to maintain your current rankings. I use both Joomla and WP. Both are great platforms, but I love Joomla. It's a bit of a pain to learn at first, but the flexibility and plugins are far superior to anything I've seen or used on WP. Good luck with the switch. PS: Use SH404SEF for your SEF URL's, Meta Management and Redirects. They just switched to being a paid Component, but I think it's only $30/year. Pretty cheap if you ask me. You can also search around and find an older copy for free if you don't want to pay the $30.
One other item to note is that with using Joomla, you will need an external extension (such as sh404sef or JoomSEF) to do the same level of SEO/SEM that comes with Wordpress out of box. Overall theres probably more power with Joomla but with such a small site, I'd be curious why you're planning to move away from Wordpress? The crucial aspects are to make sure the SEF URLs don't change, along with the content and META data. But I would think the larger concern would be future pages that you create and insuring they mimic the previous setup for SEO, since it appears its working for you