Guide for Merging Two WordPress Websites without Sacrificing SEO
Merging two WordPress websites offers many benefits. It offers the chance to combine content from your old blog with the new one so that you have all your content in one location. You can also use this method to merge a failing blog with your primary blogs. Merging sites makes it easier for you to maintain your websites since you don’t have to run, market, update and back them up separately. You only maintain a single WordPress website. In this post, we will be looking at the steps of merging two sites without losing SEO.
Exporting content
The first thing you will need to do is to create backups of the two websites you want to merge. You then need to visit Tools>>Export page on the admin area of the old website. The old website is the one you wish to merge with the new one. Let’s call the old website A and the new website B.
Ensure that you select ‘All Content’ before clicking on ‘Download Export File’. WordPress will prepare an XML file which is then sent to your browser. Save the file on your computer. The XML file will contain your posts and pages, custom post types as well as categories and tags as well as custom taxonomies.
Merging on new website
Merging two WordPress websites requires that you head to the admin area of website B. That is the new website. Go to Tools>>Import page. Scroll to the bottom and select ‘Install Now’ link. After installing the WordPress importer, select ‘Run Importer’. After that, you will be asked to upload the WordPress export file that you downloaded from Website A. Select ‘Choose File’ and select the XML file on your computer. Select ‘Upload file and import’ button. After analyzing the file, WordPress will upload the file. You will then be redirected to the import settings page.
From the import setting page, you will need to assign authors or to simply create new authors. After that, select ‘Import Attachments’. This will import all the media attachments from the old website. To get to the final step, click on ‘Submit’. WordPress will import content from the export file and add them to the new website. A success message will be displayed when you are done.
Set up redirects
You will need to set the redirects to complete the process of merging two WordPress websites. Start by editing .htaccess file on the old website. You can do this by connecting to the WordPress site using the FTP client or using File Manager Tools in the WordPress hosting cPanel. You will find the .htaccess in the root folder of the old website. Replace the domain name with that of the new WordPress site.
These are the simple steps you need to take when merging two WordPress websites. After that, you will have to test your website regularly to spot errors.