Moving a WordPress site to a new host is a giant pain. That is especially true if you are using a lot of plugins and custom work. In our case we have six old blogs that are sitting on hosting accounts we would like to drop. We keep putting off doing anything because it takes so much effort and technical skill. I’m sure we could hire someone to do it, but I hate to let someone else that deep into our accounts.
WP Twin launched recently and purports to do an exact copy of your old WordPress site, including themes & plugins, and let you upload them to a new server. It also claims you can upload a site from one domain to another and it will correct all the links to work on the new domain.
We are especially interested in getting off of our old servers and on to different ones. In addition, the idea of easy, regular backups is attractive. If WP Twin works as advertised you can easily make a backup before you update WordPress and/or you plugins. Then, when your update fails for some reason you can use the backup to immediately revert to your old setup. If you have ever had an update crash your system, you know how valuable that is.
I immediately bought a copy of WP Twin and tried it out. Unfortunately, our old sites are running at a hosting company using a DirectAdmin control panel (NOT CPANEL) and suPHP. WP Twin will not work under these circumstances, which was a real letdown.
We now have to evaluate more difficult solutions. What you see on PaulAndErik.com now is the result of upgrading our WordPress install on the old host. We had to do that to get the Import/Export feature of WordPress. We used that to export the old site and then imported the site to a new host running CPANEL.
The result is:
- The theme did not transfer. What you see now is the default WordPress theme
- Askimet was the only plugin to transfer and I had to re-enter my API key
- I have no idea if the changes will impact any SEO related features
Since PaulandErik.com is just a personal blog where we occasionally write about our work, none of that is a really big deal.
The more difficult question is if this is an acceptable way to transfer sites that have significant income and/or ranking. Some of the factors to consider would be:
- Is the old site/design doing the job? In our case our interests have changed. PaulandErik.com was written when we thought we wanted to grow a web development business. For a variety of reasons, we have lost interest in that.
- While we hate to just throw away a well ranked and indexed site the reality is it needs significant editing to reflect our current interests and plans. It would require a lot of work to edit the old content to fit the new situation. To the extent that new pages were required that would dilute old SEO in any case.
- We have learned a few things since we built this site. Starting from scratch we would build a more tightly focused site and make some changes to the technology.
- Our old site had our about page as the home page. I thought this helped visitors understand what we were all about. Unfortunately, it also made it look as if our site never updated because the home page was always the same.
I have decided to leave the site as is, not worry about the plugins that grouped and categorized our posts, and publish this post at the top of the home page. As time goes on I will be directing links from our other sites, which I used to point to PaulAndErik, to other places. Over time the rankings of this site will drop and at some time in the future it will gradually fade away.
Can you tell I like new things 