moving a non WP site onto wordpress ?? good or bad

[scrawnybob]

hi all

(lost the long post damn)

anyway short is - Im thinking about moving my main site onto WP template so it will match some of my related sites design wise

I can also see some advantages in terms of adding content and seo tools which MIGHT make it worth doing

what are the up and down sides ?

things like making sure all the pages are correctly named etc - has anyone tried to do this (also with VB forum integrated)

site I'm thinking of changing is www.4kingpoker.com

some of the 4king sites using the WP template to match to (works in progress) -

www.4kingpokerblog.com
www.4kingcasino.com

not sure if this is a bad idea all round - but I kind of think the WP sites look better than my old main site (maybe not) and I can see advantages of getting away from a cluncky custom built php setup that 4kingpoker is on as there are alot of excentric things to work around

where as WP has a good basic structure afaiks and easier to get anyone to work on rather than one coder who built the old site

at the moment while I get on great with the coder / designer who looks after my main site / does code changes etc - I kind of feel a bit tied in terms of not being able to fiddle with too much myself and any big mods I have in mind take along time and can have unexpected problems - a move to WP would help this on alot of fronts as I could do more myself and also utilise plugins etc rather than everything (even basic stuff) being a custom faff (and then not get done as a result)

any advice or experience would be appreciated

this may be the worst idea since chocolate teapots & my #1 priority is obviously not to risk putting the main site into a nose dive by moving platform / screwing up all the indexed page names etc etc

cheers scrawnybob

[jdwanchalk]

I did it manually once, but it was only around 50 pages.

I am unaware of any other way of doing it. It might be a huge pain changing all of your links to other pages on your site and whatnot.

[Skinski]

I've moved a blogspot over to wp and it was so simple that even a pc illiterate as myself done it with no problem. Not sure about moving other sites though .

[Tom]

I have changed several older websites I had to wordpress and it was the best thing I could have done. The code was much cleaner, it was easier to update and maintain, and future design changes and modifications are easier.

It just takes time changing the design and changing all your pages to posts/pages in wordpress. Then you need to make sure you redirect pages that might have changed urls.

[scrawnybob]

thanks for the feedback

I'm guessing there must be an automated way to reintegrate a VB forum into WP site (because its integrated into the current one)

but is it really a case of manually replacing / creating all the non forum pages over in WP ? if so thats a hell of a long winded job - its got to be at least 200+ pages which I dont think I'd want to try and move

anyone else moved a big site over - or are there better ways to do it

cheers scrawnybob

[Trikkur]

I'm pretty sure you are going to have to recreate the pages in wordpress and copy/paste the content over. I can't think of any way around that besides outsourcing it.

[pokerprop]

I've moved 500+ page websites to wordpress on multiple occasions. I've also moved dozens of smaller sites both that I've purchased and for PAL members making the change.

Overall the search results have improved. But this is likely because usually I am taking bloated slow loading code and putting it into very clean, compressed and minimalistic code for the new site.

Yes moving pages sucks. You should be able to find someone for $2-$3 a page though to do it for you if you want to save the long project.

[Graham]

Set up a test site and compare the coding with non-wordpress vs. wordpress. You will probably have to spend a good amount of time cleaning up the WP code, but depending how your current coding is, it may even be an improvement.

[pokerprop]

I recommend installing wordpress in a sub directory of your site that is blocked by robots and also to keep the no index tag features in wordpress (settings > privacy) on while testing it. Once you see everything works as expected you can move the index file into the main directory (change it to add the subdirectory as the path it is getting files from), delete all your old pages from server (backed up first of course) and your good to go.

This is not a very difficult process. Time consuming is the only real challenge.

[Poker_Pro]

what i would do is just start a fresh site and copy your content across. Ive tried migrating a 50+ website and although i did it successfully, it was a pain in the arse!

you can obv keep domains as you need to just re-point them.