I'm stuck on a strange, totally hacked together site that is composed of joomla 1.15, a VBulletin forum, a Wordpress Blog, and a handful of sales pages in straight HTML. With the current licence horrors at VBulletin, plus the fact I'm so out of date with joomla, I'd love to finally pull this all together into one coherent CMS system. I'm less and less happy with Joomla, as it always seems a little clunky no matter what I do with it. Wordpress appeals, as does Invision Power, but there may be others. Main question is: has anyone any idea how I might accomplish getting out of Joomla, and this situation as a whole, this without taking major hits on Google for all the pages I have ranked? (At considerable effort!!) Is basically a matter of having a massive set of manually created rewrite rules in the .htaccess for whatever I decide to move to? I have something like 350 pages of original content in the Joomla, Wordpress and hand coded pages areas, plus 25k posts in the forum. The more I think about it the more it alarms me! Thanks for any and all thoughts, Phil
As long as you're redirecting/rewriting all your old URLs then that really is the best you can do. By moving to another platform/CMS there's always the possibility of a shakeup in your SERPs but that's all down to how SEO friendly you manage to make your new site, the structure of it etc. I did consider jumping from Joomla! to another CMS last year but, although Joomla! gives me headaches at times, it was a case of "better the devil you know". I kept as tight a reign on URLs as I could and had a lot of rewrites, many manual; some terms went up, others down, but overall with the tweaks we did to Joomla! it works so much better than it did out of the box. It is an alarming prospect but you have to have some pain in a move of any magnitude. Thankfully the last migration/upgrade was only a few thousand pages, the next time it will be tens of thousands!