Since Oracle announced the shut down of LightCMS, you may be wondering what your options are to keep your website from disappearing. Migrating your website’s content to a new CMS, such as Wordpress, will ensure that your site stays running for your visitors while keeping any search engine indexing that your site may have.
Website migration is the process of moving existing content like web pages, blog entries, event calendars, and resources from one content management system to another. This may seem pretty simple, but the migration process opens up many important questions that need to be answered like how navigation will be preserved, how links will be redirected, which content will be migrated, and how to ensure existing functionality remains.
If you don’t have experience migrating a website, you probably don’t want to risk doing it yourself, even if your site is small. You can end up losing important content and damaging your search engine rankings if you don’t take necessary steps during the migration process.
Wondering just what it takes to migrate your site to Wordpress? This guide will show you step-by-step how it works.
Backing up content, getting a list of indexed pages, and saving important elements like meta data descriptions and title tags is a very important step. Developers will refer to this website backup to ensure all content is seamlessly transferred over and nothing slips through the cracks.
Setting up link redirects will help search engines understand that your website’s links have changed and helps users navigate to the correct page without running into any 404 or “Page Not Found” errors. But before any redirects are established, a map is created to keep track of every link on the existing site and what the redirect link will be on the new site.
Now that your site has been backed up and a redirect list has been created, it’s time to set up a new site on Wordpress. Users will still be able to visit your existing site and not see the new site until your organization’s domain name is pointed to your new hosting.
Now it’s time to move your content. Depending on the complexity of your content a combination of manual and automated techniques may be used to move the content to your new site.
For many of your existing pages, it may be possible to keep the same URL on your new platform. While this is the most ideal scenario, you may not be able to keep the same URL for every page. This is where the redirect map will come in handy. Developers will use this list to manually set up permanent 301 redirects for each link so they now go to their respective page on the new site.
This is a very important step because this tells search engines that all links have been moved permanently and search engine bots will start crawling pages on your new site instead of your old one. Once all redirects are set up, each one will be tested to ensure they link to the correct page and there are no 404 errors.
If you already have Google Analytics, the same UA code should be used to keep recording visitor statistics in the same profile. If your old site did not have Google Analytics, it will be installed on your new website to monitor important insights like user behavior, sources of traffic, and which pages are most popular among visitors. A code snippet will be placed within your new website’s code called a UA Code. This code will send information to Google Analytics so you can keep track of your website’s performance.
Another important step is submitting your sitemap to search engines. A sitemap is a file that contains web page links, videos, and all other files that are on your website. Once developers have generated a sitemap for your new website, they will set up a Google Search Console account and submit your sitemap to Google. This lets Google bots crawl your new website and index pages.
Now that your new website has all of the existing content and redirect links set up, it’s time for quality analysis. This is the last step before making the website accessible to the public. Developers will look for any technical errors on content pages, test all links, check the website’s responsiveness by testing on different devices and browsers, and make sure Google Analytics is installed properly. Performing a quality analysis will help determine if there is anything that was missed during the site migration and if any other errors need to be corrected before launching the site.
Website migration can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Our team of web developers, content writers, and digital marketing professionals are ready to migrate your website from LightCMS to Wordpress and will guide you through each step of the process. Our team will make sure your content is transferred seamlessly and nothing gets left behind. Once your new Wordpress site is launched, we will provide training on how to use the new CMS so your organization can get right back to work!
If you’d like to discuss your website’s migration, redesigning your website with a fresh new look, or just want to ask a question, get in touch with us.