Merging WordPress Websites

This project was a bit complex as the website migration was part of a larger organizational change for the company. We needed to maintain branding, styling, and search visibility for the original company name, as it was an industry standard (and what many people were still searching for). At the same time, our team needed to build awareness of the products and services offered, under the new company name – hence the move to their website. 

Content Migration Between WordPress Sites

The first step in our project was getting all of the content migrated from the old site into the new site. My team had recently migrated content from another platform into this new site, so we had set up templates and styling required leadership to make the process a bit easier. Essentially we were ready to “accept” the content. We simply had to migrate that content into the new pages. Since both sites were on WordPress, this was made significantly easier by using a couple of import/export plugins, along with some small edits here and there to accommodate new styling.

Forwarding URLs to New WordPress Site

Once we had all of the content set up in the new site, we needed to set up URL forwarding. We had somewhere in the neighborhood of 1K URLs to map so I worked with my development team to implement an on-site redirection tool that could accept, designate, and map URLs in a dashboard on the new site, without having to manage anything on the original domain. The goal was to simply point the root domain of the original site to the new site and manage the redirection of the incoming URLs there. This was used with WhereGoes (from our dev. that built the plugin!) to test all of the redirects and help us maintain as few “hops” as possible for each destination page. A side note here is that the original site had a list of internal redirects of its own, so we had to migrate that list into the new redirect tool, and in the end had in the neighborhood of 1.5K 301 redirects in place.

Maintaining Search Visibility After Website Migration

The redirection tool was key in maintaining search visibility after the migration. After properly setting up individual redirects, I went live on the new site and utilized Rank Math’s canonical URL tool to point back toward each page on the original site. From there, I flipped the canonical direction to point to pages on the new site, leaving both sites live for about a week. Eventually all of the pages on the old site with SERP presence were replaced with URLs to the new site. You can see in my screenshot, this method gave us an extremely smooth swap in search visibility for our tracked key phrases over the course of a week.