Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

[ctubutis]

We’ve moved all 500+ pages, and those that don’t use the widgets are fine. I’m sure they could be better given all the capabilities of Wordpress, but I happy with just moving over one-for-one. Then we can upgrade later if we want.

Anyway, I’m leaning to your thinking of move and then fix. 👍

Please be precise. ;) You want to *copy* and then fix the *copy*, leaving the original site intact. To *move* a site implies deleting the original source, i.e. only one version remaining.

Regardless, I would copy whenever possible, using the original site as a reference. Themes are written independently by several authors, I don't expect theme-specific features to migrate over well at all... (I think I said that already). Swap DNS when you're ready to turn on your new site, simple as that.

[Gary Lewis]

We’ve moved all 500+ pages, and those that don’t use the widgets are fine. I’m sure they could be better given all the capabilities of Wordpress, but I happy with just moving over one-for-one. Then we can upgrade later if we want.

Anyway, I’m leaning to your thinking of move and then fix. 👍

Please be precise. ;) You want to *copy* and then fix the *copy*, leaving the original site intact. To *move* a site implies deleting the original source, i.e. only one version remaining.

Regardless, I would copy whenever possible, using the original site as a reference. Themes are written independently by several authors, I don't expect theme-specific features to migrate over well at all... (I think I said that already). Swap DNS when you're ready to turn on your new site, simple as that.

Chris - You are right, I didn't use the right term as we certainly didn't "move" the site as all of the pages are still on Weebly. But I'm not sure "copy" is quite right either as they didn't come across the same. At least not all of them did. Perhaps "convert" is a better term.

In any event, we think we have 100% of the Weebly-created & hosted pages up on Wordpress. But there are differences, with widgets not having converted well, if at all.

In any event, we are playing around with it to see what works and what doesn't, tweak what we can, fix broken links, etc. Basically just to get our arms around what the issues are. But I still plan to talk to WPBeginner tomorrow to see if they think they can do a better job themselves than what we've done with their tool. If so I'll probably give them the go-ahead to convert it and put it on a Bluehost site. They don't charge for the conversion if we go with one of their partners, and Bluehost is and has excellent pricing.

However, we won't truly be swapping the DNS. We have a new URL, bullnosebible, and we'll do re-directs to take people to the new site instead of the old.

As for performance, from what I've seen the same things load at the same speed on Wordpress as on Weebly. And since we probably won't be changing things the initial user experience will be pretty much the same. But we then need to consider where files are hosted so we can get Google to crawl them, and at that time we'll also need to do the fair testing you mentioned - with a clear cache. Good point.

I've read that Google has a plugin that integrates Google Drive with Wordpress, and we could consider doing that if it would be faster and get the pages crawled. But that's down the road a bit when things are working and we are ready to move on.

And there are plenty of backup plugins as well. A review I read shows some to be either inexpensive or free and provide the features I think we need, like backing up at given times and dates, backing up on any change, incremental backups, etc.

Anyway, things are moving and it looks like we'll get there. Plus, some things will be better on the new site. For instance, this is being typed via the test site, and I just realized that the window into which I'm typing is noticeably wider than on Weebly. In fact, I just went back to the Weebly view of the forum and started a reply and the editing window is certainly smaller. I think that's due to some custom CSS I installed on the Wordpress site last night that uses 95% of the available width for the "container".

[ctubutis]

Chris - You are right, I didn't use the right term as we certainly didn't "move" the site as all of the pages are still on Weebly. But I'm not sure "copy" is quite right either as they didn't come across the same. At least not all of them did. Perhaps "convert" is a better term.

They are 2 discrete and separate operations with different results from my standpoint as a Linux sysadmin, Gary. ;)

I worked as a WordPress sysadmin for ~3 years at the company that owns the Denver Post (~350 blogs hosted on 2 Linux clusters) and so that's the perspective I'm looking at your new site from.

Right now it's a Parked godaddy site, which means it's still in limbo, usually because the contracts aren't finished yet.

In any event, we think we have 100% of the Weebly-created & hosted pages up on Wordpress. But there are differences, with widgets not having converted well, if at all.

Shocking!

In any event, we are playing around with it to see what works and what doesn't, tweak what we can, fix broken links, etc. Basically just to get our arms around what the issues are. But I still plan to talk to WPBeginner tomorrow to see if they think they can do a better job themselves than what we've done with their tool. If so I'll probably give them the go-ahead to convert it and put it on a Bluehost site. They don't charge for the conversion if we go with one of their partners, and Bluehost is and has excellent pricing.

OK, that sounds good. Bluehost has been around for a long time and has a decent reputation at what they do.

However, we won't truly be swapping the DNS. We have a new URL, bullnosebible, and we'll do re-directs to take people to the new site instead of the old.

Which means (www.)garysgaragemahal.com - or something standing in its place - will necessarily need to be alive so it can redirect users (assuming http 301 Redirect) to the new site.

Is this what you're wanting to do? If so, why? In all cases, *somebody* has to do your DNS.

As for performance, from what I've seen the same things load at the same speed on Wordpress as on Weebly. They should be. And since we probably won't be changing things the initial user experience will be pretty much the same. But we then need to consider where files are hosted so we can get Google to crawl them, and at that time we'll also need to do the fair testing you mentioned - with a clear cache. Good point.

Having content hosted "in the cloud" isn't as good from an SEO perspective as having them hosted locally. Many search engine robots won't cross DNS boundaries when indexing a site.

I thought I explained that already.

I've read that Google has a plugin that integrates Google Drive with Wordpress, Let the tracking & measuring begin and we could consider doing that if it would be faster and get the pages crawled. But that's down the road a bit when things are working and we are ready to move on.

I'd try not to. See above.

And there are plenty of backup plugins as well. A review I read shows some to be either inexpensive or free and provide the features I think we need, like backing up at given times and dates, backing up on any change, incremental backups, etc.

Anyway, things are moving and it looks like we'll get there. Plus, some things will be better on the new site. For instance, this is being typed via the test site, and I just realized that the window into which I'm typing is noticeably wider than on Weebly. In fact, I just went back to the Weebly view of the forum and started a reply and the editing window is certainly smaller. I think that's due to some custom CSS I installed on the Wordpress site last night that uses 95% of the available width for the "container".

Yeah, there are several backup solutions, Bluehost might even be able to help you with that.

Not trying to be rude or impolite, I'm just looking at it from a different perspective is all. :)

As for window width, yeah. :) There might be several places you have to adjust things but much of it is fairly simple to do.

~~

I'm not going to get back to my truck for a while it seems, gonna be spending a lot of time working before I head to Chicago for my 40th HS reunion. My sister is going with me, and she's getting us into the house we grew up in. It's all fairly nostalgic, TBH.

EDIT: If you send me a u/p I'd be glad to look around. :)

[Gary Lewis]

Chris - You are right, I didn't use the right term as we certainly didn't "move" the site as all of the pages are still on Weebly. But I'm not sure "copy" is quite right either as they didn't come across the same. At least not all of them did. Perhaps "convert" is a better term.

They are 2 discrete and separate operations with different results from my standpoint as a Linux sysadmin, Gary. ;)

I worked as a WordPress sysadmin for ~3 years at the company that owns the Denver Post (~350 blogs hosted on 2 Linux clusters) and so that's the perspective I'm looking at your new site from.

Right now it's a Parked godaddy site, which means it's still in limbo, usually because the contracts aren't finished yet.

In any event, we think we have 100% of the Weebly-created & hosted pages up on Wordpress. But there are differences, with widgets not having converted well, if at all.

Shocking!

In any event, we are playing around with it to see what works and what doesn't, tweak what we can, fix broken links, etc. Basically just to get our arms around what the issues are. But I still plan to talk to WPBeginner tomorrow to see if they think they can do a better job themselves than what we've done with their tool. If so I'll probably give them the go-ahead to convert it and put it on a Bluehost site. They don't charge for the conversion if we go with one of their partners, and Bluehost is and has excellent pricing.

OK, that sounds good. Bluehost has been around for a long time and has a decent reputation at what they do.

However, we won't truly be swapping the DNS. We have a new URL, bullnosebible, and we'll do re-directs to take people to the new site instead of the old.

Which means (www.)garysgaragemahal.com - or something standing in its place - will necessarily need to be alive so it can redirect users (assuming http 301 Redirect) to the new site.

Is this what you're wanting to do? If so, why? In all cases, *somebody* has to do your DNS.

As for performance, from what I've seen the same things load at the same speed on Wordpress as on Weebly. They should be. And since we probably won't be changing things the initial user experience will be pretty much the same. But we then need to consider where files are hosted so we can get Google to crawl them, and at that time we'll also need to do the fair testing you mentioned - with a clear cache. Good point.

Having content hosted "in the cloud" isn't as good from an SEO perspective as having them hosted locally. Many search engine robots won't cross DNS boundaries when indexing a site.

I thought I explained that already.

I've read that Google has a plugin that integrates Google Drive with Wordpress, Let the tracking & measuring begin and we could consider doing that if it would be faster and get the pages crawled. But that's down the road a bit when things are working and we are ready to move on.

I'd try not to. See above.

And there are plenty of backup plugins as well. A review I read shows some to be either inexpensive or free and provide the features I think we need, like backing up at given times and dates, backing up on any change, incremental backups, etc.

Anyway, things are moving and it looks like we'll get there. Plus, some things will be better on the new site. For instance, this is being typed via the test site, and I just realized that the window into which I'm typing is noticeably wider than on Weebly. In fact, I just went back to the Weebly view of the forum and started a reply and the editing window is certainly smaller. I think that's due to some custom CSS I installed on the Wordpress site last night that uses 95% of the available width for the "container".

Yeah, there are several backup solutions, Bluehost might even be able to help you with that.

Not trying to be rude or impolite, I'm just looking at it from a different perspective is all. :)

As for window width, yeah. :) There might be several places you have to adjust things but much of it is fairly simple to do.

~~

I'm not going to get back to my truck for a while it seems, gonna be spending a lot of time working before I head to Chicago for my 40th HS reunion. My sister is going with me, and she's getting us into the house we grew up in. It's all fairly nostalgic, TBH.

EDIT: If you send me a u/p I'd be glad to look around. :)

Chris - Thanks for the response. Below are a couple of short answers before I get into today's status. But first, why not start a thread on your truck? Otherwise it is mixed in with the other WHYDTYTT comments.

• URL: The "why" is that I think bullnosebible is a lot more descriptive of what we have than garysgaragemahal. I don't know how all the redirect things will work, although there are plug-ins to do that. But we will worry about that down the road.

• Content Hosting: I understand the advantages of hosting on the site vs on the cloud. But we can't kill the response time in an effort to get Google to find the content. So we will have to do some testing. And if the Google integration thing both gets it found by Google AND solves the response issue then we will have to consider it.

Ok, now for the status, findings, etc. As far as I can tell there are two possible ways to get a Weebly site migrated to Wordpress - WPBeginner, which is free if you use one of their partner providers, and CMS2CMS, which costs $300.

Let's start with the latter, CMS2CMS: Poo. Junk. Etc. I've had absolutely nothing but a horrible experience in trying to communicate with them. But I was willing to endure that up front if the product was acceptable. Yes, our initial effort to migrate 10 pages using their tool was abysmal, but they offered to try 20 pages done by their "pro's". So I gave them links to each page in the Engine section. You be the judge: https://demo.cms2cms.com/wordpress-5d9c7f32ad061/

But the lady at WPBeginner has been excellent to work with. However, she doesn't seem to think they can do any better of a migration than what we got using their tool. And as previously said, the words came through but the tabs didn't. And many of our pages use tabs. So lots and LOTS of rebuilding will need to be done.

I've been trying to clean the WPBeginner site up while I watch the MLB playoffs, and I'm on Page 19 of 28. So I hope to be "done" with the cleanup that will allow the nav menu to work in a couple of days, at which point I'll give y'all a URL so you can go look. But right now it is a real mess, and y'all seeing that wouldn't serve any purpose.

So it looks like the way to migrate the site is to use the results from the WPBeginner tool and go through it page by page and make it right. That's a HUGE undertaking, but at this point in time I think it needs to be done. I've gotten to a point on the Weebly site that I loathe adding pages because it is so onerous.

Given that, I think the plan that is emerging from the fog in my brain is to get what we have cleaned up so the nav menu works, and then take a section and make it right. That'll give me a much better understanding of how much effort it'll be to do the whole thing, and then a decision can be made.

[85lebaront2]

Chris - Thanks for the response. Below are a couple of short answers before I get into today's status. But first, why not start a thread on your truck? Otherwise it is mixed in with the other WHYDTYTT comments.

• URL: The "why" is that I think bullnosebible is a lot more descriptive of what we have than garysgaragemahal. I don't know how all the redirect things will work, although there are plug-ins to do that. But we will worry about that down the road.

• Content Hosting: I understand the advantages of hosting on the site vs on the cloud. But we can't kill the response time in an effort to get Google to find the content. So we will have to do some testing. And if the Google integration thing both gets it found by Google AND solves the response issue then we will have to consider it.

Ok, now for the status, findings, etc. As far as I can tell there are two possible ways to get a Weebly site migrated to Wordpress - WPBeginner, which is free if you use one of their partner providers, and CMS2CMS, which costs $300.

Let's start with the latter, CMS2CMS: Poo. Junk. Etc. I've had absolutely nothing but a horrible experience in trying to communicate with them. But I was willing to endure that up front if the product was acceptable. Yes, our initial effort to migrate 10 pages using their tool was abysmal, but they offered to try 20 pages done by their "pro's". So I gave them links to each page in the Engine section. You be the judge: https://demo.cms2cms.com/wordpress-5d9c7f32ad061/

But the lady at WPBeginner has been excellent to work with. However, she doesn't seem to think they can do any better of a migration than what we got using their tool. And as previously said, the words came through but the tabs didn't. And many of our pages use tabs. So lots and LOTS of rebuilding will need to be done.

I've been trying to clean the WPBeginner site up while I watch the MLB playoffs, and I'm on Page 19 of 28. So I hope to be "done" with the cleanup that will allow the nav menu to work in a couple of days, at which point I'll give y'all a URL so you can go look. But right now it is a real mess, and y'all seeing that wouldn't serve any purpose.

So it looks like the way to migrate the site is to use the results from the WPBeginner tool and go through it page by page and make it right. That's a HUGE undertaking, but at this point in time I think it needs to be done. I've gotten to a point on the Weebly site that I loathe adding pages because it is so onerous.

Given that, I think the plan that is emerging from the fog in my brain is to get what we have cleaned up so the nav menu works, and then take a section and make it right. That'll give me a much better understanding of how much effort it'll be to do the whole thing, and then a decision can be made.

Ok, I just looked at a couple of the sections, the 351/400 portion seems to have migrated very well, the 385 pages, nothing really there to look at.

[Gary Lewis]

Ok, I just looked at a couple of the sections, the 351/400 portion seems to have migrated very well, the 385 pages, nothing really there to look at.

Bill I think you are missing several things. First, they didn't do what I asked, and what they agreed to do, meaning convert the whole of the Engine & Exhaust sections, which make up 20 pages. Instead they converted 9 pages into 9 posts. Posts, as in blog posts. Not pages.

Second, of the 9 they did none of them came over intact. Here's a side-by-side of the lower portion of the 351M And 400 original on the left and their's on the right. Overlooking the fact that their page isn't nearly as wide as the original, which is a setting on their website, notice to complete lack of the tabs, each of which holds a lot of documentation. At least the WPBeginner conversion had the tabs, although no content was in them. But the CMS2CMS conversion doesn't even have the tabs.

[ctubutis]

Bill I think you are missing several things. First, they didn't do what I asked, and what they agreed to do, meaning convert the whole of the Engine & Exhaust sections, which make up 20 pages. Instead they converted 9 pages into 9 posts. Posts, as in blog posts. Not pages.

Second, of the 9 they did none of them came over intact. Here's a side-by-side of the lower portion of the 351M And 400 original on the left and their's on the right. Overlooking the fact that their page isn't nearly as wide as the original, which is a setting on their website, notice to complete lack of the tabs, each of which holds a lot of documentation. At least the WPBeginner conversion had the tabs, although no content was in them. But the CMS2CMS conversion doesn't even have the tabs.

https://wordpress.org/support/article/pages/

[Gary Lewis]

https://wordpress.org/support/article/pages/

Chris - What are you trying to say? I'm somewhat aware of the difference between pages and posts. As I'm sure you are aware, we have no posts on the documentation portion of the website, and over 550 pages.

Anyway, what are you wanting me to see?

All - Time for an update. Chris/ckuske found a statement that suggests that we might be able to upload an export of a Weebly site to Wordpress. As it turns out, the way you "backup" a Weebly site is to export it and save the file. After the most recent addition to the site, which was a week ago today, I exported the site and then downloaded the file. Chris is going to try to import that file into Wordpress soon, and we'll find out if that works.

But, to give you a bit of background, that file is 1.7Gb in size and takes between 3 and 4 hours to download. However, of my three Windows machines the only one that is able to download it is this Microsoft Surface tablet. The other two always have "network failures" part way through the download, and while you can "resume" the download you never get done. In fact, on this tablet if you download or upload anything else while downloading the export then you'll get a network failure.

So that means that backing up the site is a real bear. In addition there's no way to automate the backup that I can find. All of that adds fuel to my fire of moving us to Wordpress where there are lots of plugins that will automatically backup the site.

[Gary Lewis]

Chris - What are you trying to say? I'm somewhat aware of the difference between pages and posts. As I'm sure you are aware, we have no posts on the documentation portion of the website, and over 550 pages.

Anyway, what are you wanting me to see?

All - Time for an update. Chris/ckuske found a statement that suggests that we might be able to upload an export of a Weebly site to Wordpress. As it turns out, the way you "backup" a Weebly site is to export it and save the file. After the most recent addition to the site, which was a week ago today, I exported the site and then downloaded the file. Chris is going to try to import that file into Wordpress soon, and we'll find out if that works.

But, to give you a bit of background, that file is 1.7Gb in size and takes between 3 and 4 hours to download. However, of my three Windows machines the only one that is able to download it is this Microsoft Surface tablet. The other two always have "network failures" part way through the download, and while you can "resume" the download you never get done. In fact, on this tablet if you download or upload anything else while downloading the export then you'll get a network failure.

So that means that backing up the site is a real bear. In addition there's no way to automate the backup that I can find. All of that adds fuel to my fire of moving us to Wordpress where there are lots of plugins that will automatically backup the site.

Some of you may be wondering where the idea of moving the site to Wordpress stands. After all, it has been almost two months since anything was said about it.

Basically, the move apparently isn't going to happen. Chris/ckuske did a bunch of work trying to find an automated way to resolve the problems that he found and finally came to the conclusion that it would be less work to rebuild the site page by page on Wordpress than it would be to figure out how to automagically migrate it. And rebuilding it would be a huge, HUGE pain!

So I went back to my issues with Weebly and determined that I can live will all but one of the problems, and that is the pain it has been backing the site up, as described in the previous post. But, I also discovered that the problem of having "network failure" during a backup was a lot worse than I'd described. In fact on this tablet, which had been the least bad one to use for downloading the backup, a recent test had me have to resume the backup probably 30 times over a span of 12 hours to finally get it done. Clearly that wasn't acceptable.

So I did some looking for ways to fix that problem. And luckily I seem to have found one - Auto Resume Downloads extension for Google's Chrome browser. The reviews of it are mixed, but it works a treat for me. I'm now able to start a download on any of my computers and it will run to completion in a couple of hours with no babysitting on my part. Yes, there are "network failures" along the way, but in a minute or so the download automatically resumes.

Given that, I've now started adding pages to the site again. And each time I add a page or documentation to an existing page, I go through the process of causing Weebly to generate a backup and then I download the file and save it.

[Rembrant]

Given that, I've now started adding pages to the site again. And each time I add a page or documentation to an existing page, I go through the process of causing Weebly to generate a backup and then I download the file and save it.

Gary,

I see you're catching up on some projects today! Did you take a day off from being retired?>..lol.

I'm just kidding, I know you're a busy guy!