Moving an existing site to a Wordpress site?

[Seamaster]

Tweet

I've got quite an old site (4-5 months) that is made with html and css but I would like to make it into a Wordpress site.

The site is ranked on page two in Google so I've not got much to loose but was wondering if anyone had done this and if they suffered and kind of SERP related penalty?

I would still be on the same domain but would instal Wordpress, delete the existing pages and copy the written content into the Wordpress site.

I would plan to do it pretty quickly so save there being much down time.

Good idea or not?

Cheers.

[thebusiness]

I would plan to do it pretty quickly so save there being much down time.

leave your existing site and put wordpress in a sub-folder. Activate it but select the block search engine option in privacy settings.
Add your content in your own good time and test everything works.

When you are ready, put the index.php in the root and remove the exitsing index.html.
Re-set the privacy to allow search engines and do 301 redirects from all your old pages to the new.

There is bound to be some disruption and you may drop a bit after a couple of weeks - but the benefits of wordpress seo could well be worth it in the long run?

There are a few details I've skipped, but this is the general way I'd approach your situation.

[Seamaster]

Sounds do-able. Thanks, I'll give it a shot.

[thebusiness]

Sounds do-able. Thanks, I'll give it a shot.

Some guidance on setting up a separate directory - it's best to get this right to begin with
Giving WordPress Its Own Directory WordPress Codex

[Lunchbox]

I thoroughly recommend the "Redirection" plugin for 301 redirects. Really easy to set up and can also be used to cloak links.

[sabian1982]

I'd perhaps consider using htaccess, set up simply redirects from the old page names to the new page names when you move your new site over... definately don't want any duplicate content issues. Plus if you've built some internal links then this is a good way of passing the juice through to the new pages.

Hows your last few months been going btw... not been around much, been too busy working lol

[mightyone]

How does this 301 redirection plugin work?

Do you manually have to redirect each page or does the plugin do it all for you?

I have a deal site with over 500 deals? I want to move them all over to wordpress?

Any ideas?

[Seamaster]

I installed the Wordpress plugin and setup the urls to be redirected but when I click on the links in Google it still went to the old pages.

Hows your last few months been going btw... not been around much, been too busy working lol

Income went down the month before last and then went up a bit last month but not back to how it was a few months ago.

This month is going ok but have been dabbling with PPC the last few days and although started off well might have cut into this months profits.

We shall see, only 4 days to go.

[Lunchbox]

How does this 301 redirection plugin work?

Do you manually have to redirect each page or does the plugin do it all for you?

I have a deal site with over 500 deals? I want to move them all over to wordpress?

Any ideas?

I've only used it for single page redirects and cloaking so far. Not really high volume stuff. Not sure if there's anything out there for bulk use.