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!