4 Tips to Help You Migrate from Joomla to WordPress

January 14, 2014 by Daniel Sharkov|

The following is a guest post, written by Mariana Kordas.

Magnifying WordPress majesty is so useless nowadays, isn’t it?

Taking more than a half of market share, it’s pretty clear that this content management system is the most-wanted website building utility. Started from a simple blogging platform, WP has blossomed into the CMS that boasts its all-inclusive opportunities for any kind of web projects.

What is the most magnificent thing about WordPress is the wise simplicity that makes this instrument an enfant cheri.

If lately, you have given your preference to Joomla, but want to pick up a piece of WordPress glory, we’ve prepared an all-the-way guidance on how to migrate your Joomla website to WordPress carefully and accurately.

Naturally, website migration is not an easy meat, but the granular and thought-out plan will rule everything out. At first, we should divide Joomla to WordPress migration into 3 main strategies:

Website Content Migration Extensions Data Transfer SEO Maintenance

Now, let’s deep into the migration stream groundly.

1. Getting Started: Hold Yourself Ready

Initially, you should proceed with a few preparatory steps. To run migration smoothly and without any sharp movements, follow this instruction:

Get Rid of Out-of-Date Content

If you run your website for a long time, more probably there are some obsolete data or irrelevant information. In this case, you may delete it absolutely in order to save much time and effort for your future migration.

Make a Backup

One more hint of effortless Joomla to WordPress migration is the backup option. This will help you to avoid all a risk of data transfer. Also, if you need some old page or post, you will be able to get this info from the saved copy. You may use a hard drive, DVD drive, or just use such option of your hosting provider.

2. WordPress Investigation

Now, you may finally install your new WordPress website. Choose your hosting provider and scrutinize the every angle of WP.

Install Plugins

It’s recommended to install the plugins that are similar to ones on your Joomla site. For instance, if you have an image gallery (like Phoca Image Gallery) at your Joomla, there’s nice analogue at WordPress – NextGen Gallery; if you use sh404SEF extension on your current site, just install the similar, for example, WordPress SEO by Yoast. The same you may do with the forum plugin.

Set up SEO URLs Structure

Before migrating from Joomla to WordPress, enable WP SEO URLs. Just go to the WP Dashboard->Settings->Permalinks->Custom Structure.

Choose New Theme

Of course, you may try to migrate your Joomla template to WordPress, but it’s less time consuming if you just choose the new one from WP theme repository or any other third party one.

3. Joomla to WordPress Content Migration Options

So, now we come to the content migration procedure right up close. There are two common ways of converting Joomla to WordPress:

Classical Copy/Pasting

Otherwise, this method is known as manual migration – you just cut and paste all the content from Joomla to WordPress core. Honestly, wasted time and low spirits are the main characteristics of such a process. On the other hand, it works well if you just have a few pages and posts.

Revolutionary Automation

Lately, it was developed an automate CMS and forum migration service – CMS2CMS. It’s suitable for the extended sites conversion and basically takes 15 minutes of Joomla to WordPress migration, and includes the transfer of SEO modules data, Joomla Kunena to bbPress data conversion and automated 301 URLs redirects. The back side of such a switch is the thing, it’s unable to convert customized content. You may check up Joomla to WordPress migration items below:

4. Life After Migration: Site Recover

When the data transfer is over, the first urgent thing is to get your site visitors and SEO juice back. Let’s start:

Make Your Site Crawlable

First, make sure your site is crawlable by Google bots. You may do this with the help of robots.txt file that inform the spiders whether this or that page should be indexed. One more important thing is, Google bots can’t read non-text content, like images, video and audio files, so be certain that images includes “alt text attribute” and title in HTML. While video and audio should comprise a written transcript (it means – embed).

Liquidate the Broken Links

Check up whether there are the broken links (404 errors) and get rid of them immediately. It will be an effective practice for SEO as well.

Set Up Redirects

Also, the crucial issue is to refer your site users to the new web page location (together with the Google bots). The alternative way – permanent 301 URLs redirects from Joomla site to WordPress. As it was mentioned below, CMS2CMS inserts them automatedly, you should just paste the code into config files of your sites.

Afterword

On the whole, Nelson Mandela said, ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done’. So, now you know that it’s not so complicated to migrate your website, it’s just a little patience and insistence.

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