Hi folks, I’m thinking about moving my blog from WordPress to Write.as Pro. Are there any best practices for the following items?
How do I minimize impact to whatever SEO that I have built up? Or, should I expect to lose out on any past SEO if I choose to move from WP?
A few sites have linked back to my blog. How can I re-direct those links to my write.as blog?
I assume I’ll have to manually copy/paste my posts from WP to write.as. Should I just copy/paste all the content before I shut down my WP blog? Or, are there other considerations I need to make?
Welcome @jehan! I’d be more than glad to give some advice.
So the answer to questions 1 & 2 are related. You’ll need to use a redirect Wordpress plugin so that when people click on a link to your Wordpress blog post they’ll be redirected to the Write.as blog post. This will help minimize the impact on your SEO (1) & will make sure those link backs still work (2). There are a couple plugins out there that do this so I think it’s just a matter of personal preference.
As far as 3 goes, you’re right — you’ll have to manually copy/paste your posts to Write.as. If you have extensive styling (links, bold & italics, etc), make sure you paste in the HTML so that you can retain that on your Write.as blog. Do you use photos on your blog that are hosted via Wordpress as well?
Hope that helps! Would be happy to answer further questions.
To save yourself the trouble of copy/paste for every post, then editing all the messy Wordpress markup out of it. You could export your site to markdown, then it would simply being a case of pasting it into Write.as.
@kevquirk to the rescue! Thanks a ton for that tip — that’d definitely be a lot more helpful than trying to deal with all that cruft from the Wordpress output.
Let us know if you need any help with doing this @jehan! There are plenty of technical folks here (Kev included) who’d be more than happy to help.
That’s super helpful, @kevquirk and @cjeller1592 – Thank you! I’ll give it a try and let you know if I get stuck.
Could you please check my thinking about another question as it relates to switching platforms? (read more below)
If I replicate all my page and blog post URLs from WP to write.as, the URLs won’t change. Only the underlying CMS/platform will change.
If the URLs don’t change, is it safe to assume that my SEO/backlinks will not be affected?
(Maybe I’m wrong, but I think I can replicate all my URLs on write.as by using the custom domain feature and by creating the same slugs for each page and post as I have on my WP site.)
Yes, that should be the case. Assuming you have setup permalinks in WordPress to be the post name.
If your permalinks are domain.com/2020/06/my-blog-post then the URLs will be different as they that’s not the structure Write.as uses.
If you’re not using the post name permalink structure in WordPress, I’d recommend change to it and delaying the migration by a month or so. This for a couple reasons:
If you update the permalinks within WP, the old ones will redirect.
Delaying the migration will allow for Google etc. to update their links to your new structure.
However, you will lose any backlinks from other sites as they will obviously change and can’t be automatically updated.
Migrating to a different system is always a risk, but if you’re careful and take your time, there’s no reason why the vast majority of your links will work.
Alternatively, if you want to be sure that ALL LINKS remain up, probably the best thing to do would be to use a new domain with Write.as, then keep your hosting up for some time (maybe a year or so?) with .htaccess configured to redirect all URLS from WordPress to the appropriate write.as page/post.
So if you currently have domain.com you could register domain.net and redirect.
After some time, you can redirect the old domain using something like a DNS CNAME and close your current hosting account.
Thanks a lot @kevquirk for your highly detailed replies. Fortunately, I used post-name permalinks 99% of the time on my WP site. From what you wrote, I think I’m safe if I recreate those URLs on my write.as blog. It will take some time to manually move my content but it will give me a chance to review all my old posts
Wow, so appreciative of this thread as I too would like to migrate my WordPress blog to write.as and really wish there were an easier way to do this. My WordPress site is on its own domain, so I assume I need to migrate everything before having write.as host my domain, or should I set up hosting with write.as first? My concern is whether or not the URL structure will change once I bring my domain over. Also, if I manually need to copy/paste post content, is there a way to post date entries, so that they match the dates on my WordPress instance? Ideally, I’d like to preserve the timeline as some of my posts are written around various events and if they all use the date I copy them over, that could be confusing. I really appreciate everyone’s help, I’m very excited to get going.
