I have a site started in Dec 2005 which is made in Postnuke. Site has about 20K pages crawled in Google. It uses short URLS but does not have title in URLs like wordpress does. So the question is should I take a risk of converting this site to WP? I have worked on the DB conversion and it has worked fine. Will I loose traffic and rankings or they will be better after the conversion. Please let me know what you guys think.
I would say No because when you have so many URL's and pages you need to have a method to make a 301 from old to new URLs or else there are chances of getting drop in ranking from Google.
Hey I was not able to vote and saw a 0-0 result for poll but when voting I could not see my voting and so voted 3 times. I reported the bug previously as well but no response.
I have made a redirect so that any user clicking on www.mysite.com/a-b-c.php reaches www.mysite.com/a-b-c (new wordpress site). I guess things would be okay with this?
As long as you do a 301 redirect it should work fine. Depending on your site, it might be that you will face a small drop in the traffic from the SE's to begin with. But you will recover quickly. If you decide to migrate to Wordpress, make sure that you structure your sitemap in a proper way, hence this will faster index the pages.
IMHO, it's not worth the time and effort to migrate...unless your objective of it on WP is far outweigh than what you have currently.
The major issue is the redirects from the old site. But it sounds like you have that covered, so I'd say go for it. Be prepared for a drop in traffic initially. WordPress is my favorite cms and I always talk to clients about redesigning in it when their original site lacks some of the basic good qualities of WordPress. And there are so many quality plugins, you won't be disappointed with the switch.
I agree. I have switched already and I do not see any loss in traffic. My CTR has increased and I am expecting more traffic once SEs crawl my new site fully.
If you wrote your own conversion tool, would you consider sharing it with the rest of the wordpress community? At one time postnuke was a very popular CMS, I even used it myself. Because postnuke was so popular at onetime, there might be other people out there just like you migrating to wordpress. The tool you wrote might come in really handy to someone else.
My vote is for WordPress. I have also worked with PostNuke in the past. It's pretty bloated and not standards compliant or it least it wasn't back then. I'd say since you already have the re-direct figured out, you will do really well with WordPress. Here's to your success!