Tips For Moving Your Blog
In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been these last few days, I took some time off to go to a conference with my wife and to celebrate my 40th birthday. (No sense keeping that secret… once you have a Facebook profile it’s hard to keep that kind of stuff hush-hush when friends start wishing you happy birthday on your wall…) I’ve not been completely lazy, though, and have spent some time tweaking and fixing things up in this blog.
Overall, I’d say the move to WordPress went off without any serious hitches and I think you’ll find things are much more stable now. If you’re considering doing what I just did, here are some tips on how to successfully move your blog:
- Put together a plan. Sketch out on paper what you’re going to do. Doesn’t have to be too detailed, but it should include the big steps.
- Warn your readers. Keep them in the loop so they’ll know that things might go wonky for a while until the dust settles.
- Stop posting. Put your blog on “pause” mode while you fiddle with things. Trying to do otherwise is just a recipe for disaster.
- Backup everything. Before you make any changes, make a backup of your current blog. Make it as complete as you can. While you’re at it, export a complete RSS feed of your blog and store it somewhere safe — it will be your backup backup copy.
- Keep the old blog up if possible. This is where having two different domains pointing to the same blog comes in handy. Just before I transitioned, I made “MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com” the primary domain for my blog and left the old blog running at that address. This let me free up “memwg.com” for the “new” blog. If things didn’t work out for some reason, I would be able to quickly switch memwg.com back to the “old” blog.
- Reserve a lengthy block of time for the move. It’ll probably take you an hour or two to get things working properly, so be sure to put aside a big block of time in which to do the move.
- Take the opportunity to fix things. If there are changes you’ve been putting off because you though they’d be too disruptive, this is the time to make them. For example, I dropped the “/blog/adsense/” in all my post URLs.
- Test the import process. Don’t try to import your complete blog in a single go. Test it with a few posts. You’ll discover things that need to be fixed before the full import will succeed.
- Redirect! URLs will undoubtedly change, so be prepared to redirect old URLs to the new ones, at least as much as possible. This is where tools like the Redirection plugin come in handy. Be sure to use a “301″ (permanent) redirect and not a “302″ (temporary) redirect — you want the search engines to update their internal data stores.
- Watch your logs. After you go “live” with the new blog, watch your access logs carefully. Pay particular attention to the 404 (page not found) errors you see, this is a great way to catch pages you’ve missed.
- Be prepared to lose things. I lost all my Techorati tags, but I knew that was happening and I didn’t care that much. The blog posts themselves are much more important.
- Put in an intelligent 404 page. If things have moved, try to help your readers find where they’ve moved to. Although that mostly means automatically redirecting the browser to the right page, a smart 404 (”page not found”) page will handle any remaining cases. The 404 page on this site shows a list of related posts, for example. See A Nearly Perfect 404 Error Page In WordPress for details on how to do this.
- Expect to keep tweaking the blog for weeks to come. Although this blog’s up and running, there are still changes I’d like to make to it. It’s mostly minor stuff, but I’ll be at it on and off for a few weeks.
I’ve probably forgotten a thing or two, but the list above covers the main points. Moving a blog is not something you want to do very often, and not something to do without good cause. But it can be done quite successfully with some effort and planning.
Technorati Tags: WordPress, blogging, tips
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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9 Responses to “Tips For Moving Your Blog”
Say Eric,
Would that conference have been in Georgia by any chance?
Ted
P.S. Happy Birthday! Half way to 80, huh?
No, the conference was in Ottawa: ASAC 2007. I was just a tourist….
Yeah, my life’s half-over now
Eric
Eric, if I’m not dreaming, you’ve moved this from Blogger, haven’t you? Installing Wordpress is something that I have been putting off doing for far too long also and, was just about to do it, when the import gadget I was going to use, had become broken by “new” Blogger. Can you tell us what you used or make any recommendation over this please?
Actually, I moved the blog over from blojsom, a very different beast than Blogger. The import process was fairly straightforward. I first generated a full RSS 2.0 feed for my existing blog and saved the feed as a file on my local hard drive. The feed was very large, so I split the feed into two separate files. I then took a small fragment of one of the files and used WordPress’ bult-in import facility to import the postings in that file. I checked things over and found some problems, so I deleted the posts I had just imported and then tweaked the input file again. I repeated this process until I was happy with the results, after which I imported the full feed. It worked out fairly well, but it’s not something you can do in 5 minutes.
Thank you. Actually, I imagine that could still be made to work, by reformatting the template of the old blog first. At least I can see what’s required and how I might do it now that I had not before.
An idea for another update is how much traffic you’ve lost (hopefully none) from the search engines.
This is mainly due to ranking drops, as the old posts would be redirecting to the new posts, but I’m wondering if you’ll go any lower in the rankings while Google adjusts the new pages’ PR.
My hope is that my pages won’t lose their rankings at all because I’m using 301 redirects to move them to their new locations. Well, that’s not quite true: most of the pages right now have no PR at all But when Google updates its index hopefully the PR from the old locations will magically transfer to the new ones.
Going forward I expect things to be much better. I had problems with the old site with pages showing up in the supplementary index and generally not being indexed very well. These problems should all disappear over the long term.
I know you have a list of things to do with regards to tweaking your blog, but I think there’s one thing that you should do as soon as possible (while Google’s still getting to know your site). That is, if you haven’t skipped this on purpose.
I’m talking about only showing the entire post’s text when you’re on a post’s page ( if(is_single()). And show an excerpt of some sorts for your home, archive and category pages.
This was one of 3 things I changed a month ago, and I have since increased my traffic by 100%.
Could be a coincidence, but it might not be…
Ignore me if you’re already doing this. I’m just amazed at the results, and wanted to share
I’ve considered doing that, but I’ve always provided full content on the home page. I don’t know if I want to change it at this point.