question on migrating static HTML site to Wordpress

OK, here's the deal. There's an 11-year-old+ site, which gets a lot of visitors and is pretty successful, but it's really outgrown its static HTML design.

I intend to convert the site to WordPress, probably using the Headway framework (though I haven't quite settled on that yet).

It is a magazine site (reviews & articles about books, music, modern art, etc.) which also sells some collectible books.

I think I should try to keep the current directory / URL structure of the existing site as much as possible, since many of the pages have good PR (many are PR4 or PR5 - with some PR3 or less) and incoming links. But I think that won't always be possible.

I'm kind of terrified of screwing this up, since the site is very well-established and brings in a pretty good amount of income for me (mostly adsense, but also some affiliate links and direct book sales).

I am also not sure whether I should turn the existing pages into Wordpress pages, or into posts. Probably posts? But I am undecided - what do you think?

Can anyone advise me on the best way to go about transferring the old pages into WordPress, and keeping my search rankings and PR as much as possible? I've Googled, but there really aren't a lot of resources on this topic available. I hope there's someone out there who has experience with this type of thing.

Thanks so much. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
best,
Denise

 

I do this all the time for clients with sites of all sizes. Here is my advice.

Use Pages. Leave posts for adding a blog or something later on. Another possibility is to use custom post types. I have done that a couple times for clients but it can get more messy.

The redirection plugin is your best friend for helping redirect people/search engines in the event you do change the url structure.

Before starting scan the existing site with a link checker that can create a sitemap. That can help when rebuilding the site with the same URL structure. It can also help with redirects.

If you can, recreate the site on a sub domain or sub folder of the site and then move it over to the main site once you are done. The downside of that is your links in posts/pages might be wrong and you might need a the search and replace plugin to help fix urls.

Good Luck.

 

Better don't take any risk. Instead you can start a blog associated with it, and start posting new content. Since you have well established site it wont take long to get traffic to your new blog. Yes you can change pages to post and and use some 301 URL redirect but that will make loose its PR. Though home page PR will remain same.

And yes make your blog URL like this yoursitename.com/blog so that it gets the homepage PR juice, if you keep blog.yoursitename.com then Google will consider it as a new site.

 

LGRComp, thanks for your advice on this! It's much appreciated.

I think I would prefer to create new pages, but wonder if I can have "categories" of pages, as can be done with posts. (There are a number of article categories now, which I organize into directories, and with the navigation menu: art, music, poetry, etc...) I also need to display newly-added articles on the homepage and am not sure if that can be done with pages. The homepage needs to show blurbs from and links to newly-created content, along with some homepage-only text and ads.

I'm not too familiar with custom post types and haven't gotten deep enough into Wordpress / Headway to figure out how to do it. I'll look into how doing that might be beneficial vs. just making pages.

Don't really plan on adding a blog, but there is a "news" page which would probably be simple to maintain if news items were entered as posts.

I currently have installed Wordpress/Headway into a sub-folder, and planned to move it to the root after the new site is complete. However, somehow I thought that moving it would just be a matter of changing the address in WordPress admin and then physically moving the files. I didn't realize that dead links would be created, and that is a real issue, because cleaning all that up quickly on 300 pages after launch would be a nightmare, and I'd hate for my readers to encounter a site which wasn't working properly, even if just for a day or two. Hmm. I think I might need to develop the new site in the root after all, though I would prefer not to. Thank you for alerting me to this issue!

Thanks for telling me about the redirection plugin, too. I'll check into that.

Again, I truly appreciate your thoughts and advice on this!
cheers & gracias ~
Denise

 

markss, Thanks for your thoughts on this. I'm pretty sold on converting the site to WordPress, as it will allow me to do things I can't do (or do as easily) with a static site. I really just want to use WordPress as a CMS, instead of using it for a blog. When I change over to WordPress I intend to keep most of the URLs the same (which is pretty easy to do with plugins or with the Headway theme I'm using).

Thanks again!
best,
Denise

 

In that case you might be better off using posts. It is always hard to say without actually seeing a site and how it is done now. It is certainly easier to show blurbs if they are posts.

The links can be difficult, mainly because WordPress enters them as fully qualified URLs. A tool I often use is the WordPress plugin Search and Replace http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/ It is great for fixing up URLs! Just be sure to limit it to searching and replacing in Posts.

 

Thanks for the link to the search and replace plugin. I will check it out!

With regard to the post/page issue -
Currently I have an icon for each new article, with a brief description of it, and a link. I'd like to continue doing something along those lines. The new site can (and will) do things a little differently than the existing one, but I do need to highlight new content somehow on the homepage. So perhaps it should be posts, then.

If you are curious about the iexisting website, it's http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com - It's a bit of a mess code-wise (one of the primary reasons for the update to WP), but full very of content.

Thanks again for your thoughts! I've found them extremely helpful.

best,
Denise

 

That is a pretty impressive site. You could do it as pages, but it would take more work and some extra plugins to do what you want. Posts would probably be easiest.

Glad I could help and good luck with the redesign.