Hi all!
I’m in the process of migrating my website from squarespace to wordpress, and no, it isn’t as easy as just following the transfer process with the amount of photos I have on there – I’m essentially re-creating my website & blog. Currently, my squarespace site is still live and my domain is with ss. I also have quite a few posts that rank well with google, so want to maintain traffic up until and through the switch over.
I’ve got \~80 blog posts that will be making the move over and I’m wondering a few things, all in the name of making this transition as seamless as possible:
1. Should I be publishing blog posts I’m moving over on the wordpress placeholder domain? The site is not live. Publishing them on a “bad” domain on a non-live site won’t impact them, correct? Or should I be waiting to publish at a certain point?
2. When do I publish 301 redirects? I already have some from when I re-configued my squarespace site a while back, and I will probably have new ones with this move. I have installed the Redirection plug-in, do I need to wait to do these until I’ve moved my domain or am I able to prep this now?
3. I got set up first with bluehost but I’ve since learned that it’s not the best hosting platform – any advice on if I should just continue setting everything up and go live on bluehost and then transfer to a different hosting platform? Or should I give bluehost a chance for a bit on a live site before deciding?
4. Do you recommend setting up a “under construction” page for the wordpress site and moving the domain over like 2-3 days before the new site actually goes live and taking away the “under construction” page? or should a domain transfer be pretty seamless?
5. Anything I’m not thinking of that would be helpful if you’ve done this?
Thank you in advance – sometimes I feel like I am over-thinking everything since I’m doing this all on my own and no one I know in real life has any clue what any of this means!
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1. Setup the new site in a staging environment. A popular choice is to do it locally with LocalWP. Once you’re ready to live, you migrate your local site to your live hosting, using a WP migration plugin like WPVivid
2. You need 301 redirects if your URLs are changing. You can set those up in your new site, just use the relative path, rather than the full URL. eg if there was a URL on your SS site that was /about-us, and on your new site you’re just using /about/, then that’s what you setup.
3. For hosting recommendation, post in r/webhosting
4. Never use an “under construction” page on a live domain, you’ll kill your SEO. Build on staging, then migrate to live, THEN point your domain to the new site – so there’s no downtime.
5. Use Cloudflare – a ton of great features, like instant DNS changes, WAF rules, caching, security, and it’s free.