Need help for tranfering site

Hi all,

Yesterday i received an email from my e-shop provider to inform me that at the end of the year it will not continue to provide his services... in other words he is closing his bussiness...

Now I have a big problem because i have to built a new site (i will do it in wordpress) but i do NOT want to loose my organic links that google uses to find me...

Is there any way to "protect" my web links? The domain will be the same but the hosting provider will be of course different...

 

Just 301 redirect the old content links to the new content links. If you're just transferring over a Wordpress site to a new host, you don't have to do anything. Just point the domain to the new host after transferring the files and the database (but from your post, it seems like you're switching to Wordpress).

 

Yeap...The e-shop i use now is NOT wordpress... it uses Liquid language .... however the e-shop provider has sent me an xml backup file for tranfering the data... i am thinking not to tranfer all the categories and products i have now to the new wordpress site.... Does anybody knows any link-guide (step by step) to propose me please in order to proceed? Frost1 when you said 301...this job is doing from the search console? sorry if the question seems silly... I am not very comfort with this process...

 

No, the redirects are done in the .htaccess file on the server. If you have a lot of links/pages, I'd suggest trying to keep as much of the existing structure as possible, so you don't have to do hundreds or thousands of links manually.

 

I too recommend 301 redirects. You can try this guide if you wish

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en

 

But i dont have access to .htaccess... as i said its a third party application... they dont give access...any other way to do?

 

Uhm - you'll have access to the .htaccess on your new, Wordpress server - anything else would be weird. You'll need to go through the links (which should be in the XML-file, I presume) and add every single different type of link to the .htaccess on the new server.

Say you have something like this on the old server:
www.example.com/category/item/name-of-item
if you can keep that structure on the new host, you won't need to do anything - but if the structure on the new host is slightly different, for instance something like:
www.example.com/category/sub-item/name-of-item (stupid example, hopefully you get the idea)
then you'll need to do a redirect, something like this:
Redirect 301 ^example.com/category/item/(.*) example.com/category/sub-item/$1 - which will redirect everything from the old structure to the new stucture on the new host. (Might not be entirely accurate, the code, since I'm not that good at the exact syntax for .htaccess, but it's close enough to give you an idea)

 

Already some good answers here.
Question...is it possible to move to a host that also provides Liquid Language?
Doing so would be an immediate fall back plan while you have the new website built in WordPress. This way you could have all the 301 redirects are taken care before the new site goes live.

 

I do it this way:

1.- I set up the site at the new host, with 301 redirects for pages that change its location.
2.- Change dns to point to the new host.
3.- Wait 24-48h to shut down the old server - due to DNS propagation time -

This way you won't have any downtime.

 

I would wait a bit longer though. I transferred one of my sites, waited for 4-5 days before canceling the old package yet I still lost quite a bit of traffic afterwards since the propagation didn't quite finish. I'd recommend the OP to wait for about 2 weeks after updating the DNS, just to be on the safe side.