When I move blogs to WordPress, I always insert your analytics script back into your migrated site.  I’ve asked clients in the past if they have configured Analytics to monitor events or goals, and 99% of the time the response I get is something like, “What are you talking about?”

I would like to change that.  Now, whenever I migrate a website to WordPress I offer to work with the client in setting up Analytics to effectively gauge how their website is working in fulfilling their overall business goals.  There can be a lot of configuring to do, but the three main areas I want clients to focus on are events, goals, and funnels.

Events

Event tracking is simply monitoring certain actions being taken on your website, such as file downloads or clicking on certain links.  For example, let’s say that you have two call to action buttons on a single webpage that lead to the same place.  With event tracking in place, you can easily monitor the effectiveness of both of them and know if one is performing better than the other.

Goals

Goals are the end result of what you want a visitor to do on your website.  If one of your goals on your website is to have a visitor download an ebook, you can set this up in Analytics and monitor how frequently your goals are accomplished.

Funnels

Funnels are basically the path a visitor takes to accomplish one of the goals you have set in Analytics. For example, let’s go back to the ebook download as your goal.  In order for the visitor to reach your goal, let’s say they have to visit a landing page, click to visit a page to fill out a form, visit the download page, and then download the ebook from there.  That whole process would be a funnel.  Setting up a funnel like this in Analytics could show you how well your goal process is working.  If visitors are stopping after a certain stage, then you’ll know you have improvements to make to your website.

Your Website

Monitoring website traffic is something that everyone should be doing.  If you don’t, you are missing out on a wealth of information that can not only help improve your website, but your business as well.

There are many different options you can take when installing a WordPress site, but when we move blogs to WordPress we utilize several measures to ensure that your new website has rock-solid security and is nearly impervious to hackers.

We would like to say that our WordPress installs are 100% safe from hackers, but unfortunately, no website can make that claim.  But the steps we take will give you the highest level of WordPress security your website can have.

Some of the security measures we put into place are:

1. Preventing directory browsing
2. Change database prefixes for added security
3. Secure usernames and passwords
4. Removing all traces of the version of WordPress you are running
5. Prevent other websites from hotlinking your images
6. Denying spambots from directly accessing your comment forms
7. Protecting your .htaccess file
8. Double measures to protect your very important config file (very important!)
9. Disabling error messages that contain secure information

Alternatively, other measures at our disposal are:

1. Allowing only certain people to access your WordPress admin area
2. Preventing everyone but you to access your login page
3. Protecting unauthorized access to your WordPress site’s other main folders
4. Change the default WordPress directories location to help stop automated hacking scripts
5. Take measures to prevent attacks on your website through SQL injections and other nefarious types of attacks.

This is just a sampling of the extensive methods we take at Blog Movers to make sure that the website you receive from us stays safe and secure long after it leaves our hands.  We understand that your website is your livelihood, and our goal is to see your succeed with a WordPress site we either built or migrated for you!

Even if we’re not migrating a website for you, feel free to contact us for a quote on beefing up the security of your WordPress site.

Migrating content from Tumblr to WordPress is a lot easier since the importing plugin was developed, but many users are still having a hard time switching over.  Most of the problems arise when moving from a custom Tumblr domain to WordPress.

The solution to this problem isn’t readily apparent, but is quite simple.

If you have a Tumblr blog on a custom domain (example, www.yourdomain.com), you have to uncheck the custom domain feature in your Tumblr admin section before migrating your content to WordPress.

After you uncheck this option, your Tumblr blog address will revert back to the original URL (example, http://yourblog.tumblr.com) and will now be able to be imported into your new WordPress blog.

Need help migrating your Tumblr content?

We can help you migrate from Tumblr to WordPress.  If you would like more information on the costs and procedures involved in moving from Tumblr, please contact us and we’ll be in touch shortly.

When you’re getting ready to migrate from HubSpot to WordPress you should have a checklist of steps that need to be done before going live with your new site.  You can’t go wrong with the following items.

WordPress install

You will need to acquire new hosting for your new WordPress site and you’ll need to have WordPress installed as well.  Many hosting companies have simplified the already simple installation of WordPress, but those kinds of installs leave little room for customization and security.

It is better to install WordPress manually and to make some modifications afterwards for WordPress security.

Email setup

You may need to setup and configure email with your new hosting.  This is usually a simple process if your host has cPanel.

301 redirects

One of the things we always do when moving blogs to WordPress is to ensure that 301 redirects are in place.  We hate the idea of a website having a ton of 404 errors and losing the value of any incoming links.

WordPress theme

If you’re planning on using a stock WordPress theme, then all you have to do is upload it to your themes folder.  If you’re having a custom theme built, then you’ll need to ensure that everything looks right and functions right before going live with your new site.

Subscriber services and analytics

When moving from HubSpot to WordPress you will need to replace HubSpot’s analytics and subscriber services with something else.  We almost always replace that with Feedburner and Google Analytics.  After signing up for these services, they need to be configured and the appropriate code needs to be added to your new WordPress website.

Depending on your type of blog migration you may need to do more or less than what was just listed, but this list is always a good start.

Not every blog runs on mainstream software.  There are many blogs built on customized content management systems.  These types of blogs require a special touch when performing WordPress migrations.

Because these blogs are built on a custom CMS, there are no WordPress plugins available to import the content into a WordPress readable format.  And it’s pretty safe to say that there is probably no content export function available on the custom blog as well.

With those importing and exporting options not available, you are left with two options: either manually copying the content into WordPress or modifying the custom database into something WordPress can work with.

If the custom blog to be moved is small enough, it might make sense to just go ahead and copy and paste the articles into WordPress.  This could take less time than it would take to analyze the custom blog’s database and run a bunch of modification queries.

If the customized blog is large enough, manually importing the content this way would be very inefficient.  You will want to modify the database if possible in order to migrate the website to WordPress.

Earlier this year we were hired to migrate a website that ran on a custom CMS to WordPress.  The total amount of posts and pages to be moved numbered about 2,500.  It would have taken weeks to move that much content if we chose to do it manually.  Instead, we were able to modify the sections of their database that contained their blog posts, convert them to the format WordPress requires, and copy those database tables into the WordPress site.

By fiddling with the database, we were able to import all of the client’s content in a much shorter amount of time than if the content had to be manually imported post by post.

We can migrate your custom CMS to WordPress

Do you have a website built on a custom CMS and want to move it to WordPress?  Get in touch with us!

Moving from Blogger to WordPress is probably the most common type of blog migration.  These two types of blogging software are the most popular, which explains the large amount of migrations from Blogger over to WordPress.

Fortunately, Blogger and WordPress make these types of moves rather simple.  Blogger lets you easily export all your blog posts to a file and WordPress has a plugin that can import posts from this file.  So if it sounds like migrating content from Blogger to WordPress is easy, it usually is but there can be some hiccups along the way.

First, sometimes the blog post content doesn’t format correctly in WordPress.  You might find some large gaps between paragraphs, or you might even see some weird text where it shouldn’t be.  These issues need to be corrected before launching your new WordPress blog live.

Second, importing images are often a problem.  Even though you can see the images in your posts, the coded location of the images may still point to a location on Blogger’s server.  If you were to shut down your Blogger blog without correcting the image location, all those images in your blog posts would suddenly disappear.  That’s not good.

These issues will never be a problem when moving blogs to WordPress if all the steps in a proper blog migration are adhered to.

We move blogs from Blogger to WordPress the right way

We would love to be part of your blog migration and ensure that all your content and images make the transfer.  If you would like more information on hiring us for your move to WordPress, please get in touch with us and we’ll contact you shortly.

There can be quite a few reasons why someone would want to move their Active Rain blog to WordPress, but the most common reasons I’ve heard tend to fall in the following categories.

1.  Branding.  It can be hard to brand yourself or your business if you are using somebody else’s software.  If you want to be unique, then you have to step out on your own.
2. Flexibility.  Active Rain has a lot of great features for networking between agents, but if you want to do something with your blog that isn’t possible with Active Rain, then you’re stuck.
3. Control.  If you have your own WordPress blog, then you have total control over your website.  You choose what you publish and what you do.  You’re not bound by the terms and conditions of somebody else.
4. Domain.  If your blog is part of the Active Rain network, then your place on the web isn’t really your own.  Hosting a WordPress blog on your own domain brings with it added credibility.  With hosting costs generally running under $10 a month, isn’t it worth it?

Thinking of moving to WordPress?

We can move your blog to WordPress and give you the security in knowing that you own your web presence.  Contact us today and we’ll provide a quote that outlines the costs and procedures involved in providing you with a blog or website of your own!

When moving from HubSpot to WordPress you will obviously need a website to go along with all your migrated content.  Most people are happy with what their website looked like while on HubSpot, so one of the steps in a blog migration is to recreate that design on WordPress.

Recreating an existing design is generally an easy and straightforward process.  You take the sections and design elements that exist on the HubSpot site and duplicate them on the new WordPress site.  If you are adept with HTML, PHP, CSS and javascript, then this part can be a breeze.

While recreating the HubSpot theme you have to pay attention to certain things.  Some pages may have different layouts, so custom page templates need to be built to accommodate them.  Maybe you have images in the header section that are different on certain pages.  These all have to be taken into account when duplicating your theme and coded accordingly.

Images play a big part in this step.  Moving images from HubSpot to WordPress can be a manual process, or you can use software to accomplish this.  The method you choose really depends on how many images need to be imported for this step, and what resources you have on hand.

We can migrate your blog from HubSpot

Moving blogs to WordPress can be tricky and cumbersome at times, and we’re here to help.  If you would like more information on the costs and procedures involved in moving from HubSpot, please contact us and we’ll be in touch shortly.

Another important consideration after moving from HubSpot to WordPress is making sure that all the images used in your posts and pages reside on your new WordPress site and not on the HubSpot site.

Images can be deceiving

When moving blogs to WordPress, you will most likely reconstruct the new site on a test server before launching it.  The test server is where the actual work of migrating HubSpot content and design work takes place.

If you were to copy and paste an article from HubSpot directly into WordPress, publish it and then view the new post, your first reaction may be that everything looks fine.  All the text is there and the images you used in the post are showing up as well.  Don’t be fooled by your initial perception!

Yes, the post images are visible on your site, but those images don’t exist on your WordPress site.  They are being remotely called from your old HubSpot website.  If you revisit the WordPress post editor for the article you copied and pasted and switch to HTML view, you’ll see that the image URL for your post images points to the location on the original HubSpot server, not on your test server!

This is important to note because if you were to keep the image URLs this way, all your images will vanish once the new WordPress site goes live.  That would be bad!

Fixing the image problem

When importing content from HubSpot to WordPress, it doesn’t matter if you use the RSS importer or copy and paste; you have to correct the image URL if you want your new site to function properly.

If you are using the copy and paste method, then once you paste your article in the WordPress post editor you will need to click on the image in the post and delete it.  After that, go back to the original HubSpot article and download the post image in question to your computer then insert the downloaded image into the post you just copied.  This ensures that the image will not vanish once you flip your website over to WordPress.

If there are a lot of images on the HubSpot site you may choose to use special software or scripts to download the images from that site in bulk.  My personal favorite for this procedure is wget.  Wget allows you to do many things, including downloading all files of a specific type from an entire website.  It is very handy in blog migrations.

Need some help?

We can help you move your blog from HubSpot to WordPress.  If you would like to talk more about this, please get in touch with us and let’s start the dialogue!

One of the worst things you can do when moving a blog to WordPress is not implementing any URL redirects.  Without any redirects in place, you lose several key benefits and the user experience is diminished.

After moving your blog, redirects are needed for the following reasons:

1. SEO.  Any backlink pointing to one of your blog posts while on HubSpot helps that post with search engine rankings.  If the blog post’s URL changes without a redirect being used, then any value that link provided to you is gone.  It has now become what is known as a “broken link”.
2. SEO part 2.  Search engines frown on websites that return a lot of 404 (“page not found”) errors.  You can prevent any search engine backlash by using redirects.
3. Search engine listings.  It takes the search engines time to adjust and list your new post URLs.  Until they catch up, all your old links are still in place and anyone clicking on them will get the dreaded “page not found” error.
4. User experience.  As a website visitor, I hate clicking on a link and arriving to a 404 page.  I’m sure you feel the same way.  Redirects ensure that visitors get the information they want and it keeps them happy.

Permalink structure between HubSpot and WordPress

HubSpot uses a link structure similar to this:

http://domain-name.com/blog/bid/78252/Your-Latest-Blog-Post-Title

WordPress permalinks can be configured several different ways, but the year/month/day format looks like this:

http://domain-name.com/2011/12/14/your-latest-blog-post-title/

The key in redirects is to get the original link to automatically redirect visitors (and search engines) to the new WordPress link.  This can be accomplished by a few different methods.

First, you could use a redirection plugin in WordPress and enter the old URL and the URL it should go to.  This is the simplest and most straightforward way, and it can work well for small blogs.  However, if you have hundreds, or even thousands of posts, this is an inefficient and mind-numbing approach.

Secondly, you could (and probably should) opt for implementing redirects using regex.  Regex is short for “regular expressions” and can be a powerful tool in the right hands.  For example, moving a HubSpot blog to WordPress with 500 posts would require 500 redirect entries if done manually.  The same redirect function can be accomplished with just one entry using regex.  That is why we recommend using regex for redirects in most blog migrations.

We can help with your move to WordPress

We would be happy to discuss the possibility of moving you from HubSpot to WordPress.  If you would like more information on the costs and procedures involved in such a move, please contact us and we’ll be in touch shortly.