Search Indexing Question
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- mg33
I'm working on a new site to replace one of my current sites. It's a Wordpress site. Setting up the new site on a different domain and will just switch over the live domain to the new build when it goes live.
My question is, if everything is the same as far as existing live pages that will be duplicated on the new site (titles, SEO settings, etc) is there any risk that indexing drops off of suffers temporarily? Since it's the same domain, is it rather seamless?
On the current site that I'm redesigning, there's really only a homepage and a few pages with links. I'm adding quite a bit more to it as I'm moving photo sets to it and adding a blog.
- hereswhatidid0
Are the URLs changing? If not, you should have little to no issue from an SEO perspective. If the URLs do change you should set up 301 redirects either via WordPress through a plugin or your root .htaccess file.
- mg330
Thank you!
Have you ever done what I described? I've swapped out plenty of themes on the same domain, but I've not moved a site to a new WP install / DB before. Looks easy enough, but do you have any tips or precautions if you're done this?
- hereswhatidid0
One thing that can be potentially annoying is the domain name issue if you're setting it up on a temporary URL for testing purposes. Ideally, if the domain name is going to be the same on the new hosting you'd want to spoof that domain through your hosts file so that the URLs you test with are exactly the same as what they will be going live. WordPress will put absolute links in all the content areas for media files so unless you use something specifically for replacing those you'll want to be very careful making sure it all works when you switch from the test domain back to the live domain.
There's a lot of good information on this page as well:
- Velvet URLS plugin fixes the absolute links in seconds.fadein11
- mg330
It's on the same host and same server; live site is a .com domain, new build is it's own subdomain on a .net url.
Not that I won't be able to figure it out, but the more I think about it, the more I might just get the child theme set up on the build site, then swap the themes out on the existing site and move over the child theme, so all the customizations are in place immediately. Maybe... I'll figure it out. Thanks again for the tips!
- hereswhatidid0
Also, Migrate DB Pro is a great plugin for this kind of thing. It'll handle all the URLs, settings, etc...