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Successfully Migrating 450 Posts from Old Website to WordPress Site: A Step-by-Step Guide

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It can be difficult to transfer content from an older website to a WordPress site. However, maintaining the website’s content is essential. We will talk about the process of moving approximately 450 posts from a previous website to a WordPress site in this report.

Scraping:

Scraping all of the articles from the old website was the first step in this process. We extracted the data from each and every article using the Chrome WebScraper extension for this purpose.

In Webscraper, posts were saved as pure html to preserve formatting. A post always contained the following items:

  • Headline
  • Teaser
  • 1st image with 1st image caption
  • Body text (as html to preserve formatting)

If necessary, further images, each individually scrapped.

WebScraper provided us with an Excel file containing all of the articles following the scraping process. We removed the unnecessary columns from the document to make the data easier to read. The document had multiple columns.

WP Import Export Lite while loading the Excel file
WP Import Export Lite while loading the Excel file

Import WP:

We are using WP Imprt Export Lite to import the Excel file into the WordPress website after cleaning the data. We made sure to change the duplicate titles before importing because the target system checks for duplicate titles. We also made the first image the featured image and used HTML code to insert the other images into the post’s body.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img height="350" src="{image2src[1]}" alt="{caption2[1]}"><figcaption>{caption2[1]}</figcaption></figure>

HTML code to insert an image directly into the post text.

Table MySQL:

Once we imported the articles, we noticed some of the posts had empty images. To fix this, we removed the empty images from the MySQL table. Additionally, we searched and replaced a string in the SQL database for the following string:

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img height="350" src="" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

This step helped us remove any leftover empty images from the SQL database.

Redirects:

Finally, we used the target URLs to create redirects for each scrapped URL. For the sake of preserving the website’s SEO and maintaining its readership, this step was critical.

Conclusion:

All in all, relocating content from an old site to another WordPress site can be challanging, however the process can be smoothed out with the right tools and methods. By using a combination of WebScraper, Excel, WordPress, and MySQL, we were able to migrate around 450 posts from an old website to a new WordPress site.

Image “Car with boxes” from Siala

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