Site migration from Drupal to WordPress - Question about Drupal Back end
-
This is really a developer/Webmaster issue. The closest category available to select was "Technical SEO" - but technically, this isn't a question about SEO, per se.
I am doing free SEO work for a local arts organization as my way of giving them a charitable contribution. Despite my advice to stay on Drupal and improve the site on its current platform, they want something easier to manage for volunteers. This is perfectly understandable, although not my recommendation.
Of course, not knowing anything about SEO, their first impulse was to simply shut down the old site, cancel all of their old pages, point the domain to their new WordPress site and completely start over. Thank goodness I yelled "Halt!" before they went this far
They really have no idea what they are doing and I want to help guide them through this process in a way that preserves as much as possible their inbound links (they have tons of .edu and .gov links because they are a local community arts organization). Of course they don't understand how valuable these are, so I have a lot of educating to do.
I am trying to get them a quote from a professional developer to help migrate from Drupal to WordPress. The only login information anyone has been able to send me is login to their FTP. No one seems to have a login for the Drupal CMS back end, and when I asked for it they looked like deer caught in headlights
Can someone tell me, or even send me a screenshot of what the admin login page looks like for a Drupal site, so I can explain better to this client what I am looking for? I have no experience with Drupal, but surely, there is a backend where the site pages and content can be updated.? There must also be a database of customers/registrants, etc. not to mention a place where all the meta tags, etc can be entered and stored?
Last but not least, if no one is able to find their site's Drupal login info, is there any way under the sun for me to retrieve it for them?
I have a Developer in mind whose got loads of experience migrating from Drupal to WP, but he needs a .sql export file with the contents of the curent databse in order to give us a quote. Does anyone have any advice? (Other than "This should teach you not to offer your services up to charity!" LOL)
-
Glad I could assist, Dana. Good luck!
P.
-
Thanks very much Paul! This is wonderfully helpful. I do believe they have their hosting information so we should be able to proceed this way if necessary. I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction!
Dana
-
Paul's advice is sound Dana, shouldn't take too long to do either.
-
Dana, if "all" you need from the old install is a .sql export, that can be done from the hosting control panel (eg cPanel) or directly from phpMyAdmin even if there's no hosting control panel in use. That eliminates the need to access the Drupal install altogether
I would find out who they're hosting with and if they have the hosting control panel credentials, log in there and retrieve the sql dump. If they don't have the credentials, it's usually only a few minutes with the hosting company proving you have all the payment info necessary to prove that you (ie the arts org) own the hosting account. Then the host will provide new credentials and you can go ahead with the sql dump.
Paul
-
Thanks Jason,
Yes, that appears that it might be it. Of course I am getting an "Access Denied" response right now which is understandable. I have sent this along to the folks at the organization in hopes it rings a bell and they can track down login credentials.
I just discovered that the way they've been "updating" the site for the past several months is by creating PDFs and uploading them via FTP
ugh...
-
There will generally be a "login" button on the front page of the website. If not, try this....
The path is:
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Old site selected as canonical on GSC 3 years after migration?
Recently my company started consulting for a SaaS company. They're clearly the best known, most trusted company on their area of work and they have the strongest brand, best product and therefore more users than any of their competitors by a big margin. Still, 99% of their traffic comes from branded, despite having 3x more domains, better performance scores and more content. Even using tools such as SimilarWeb for comparing user satisfaction metrics, they seem to have lower bounce rates and more visits per session. Still, they rank for almost nothing that is non branded on Google (they rank extremely well for almost everything on bing and DuckDuckGo). They don't have any obvious issues with crawling or indexation - we've gone to great depths to tick off any issues that could be affecting this. My conclusion is that it's either a penalty or a bug, but GSC is not flagging any manual actions. These are the things we've identified: All the content was moved from domain1.com to domain2.com at the end of 2017. 301s were put in place, migration was confirmed on GSC. Everything was done with great care and we couldn't identify any issues with it. Some subdomains of the site, especially support, rank extremely well for all sorts of keywords, even very competitive ones but the www subdomain ranks for almost nothing on Google. The www subdomain has 1,000s of domains pointing to it while the support has only a few 100s. Google is performing delayed rendering attempts on old pages, JS and CSS particularly versions of assets that were live before the migration in 2017, including the old homepage. Again, the redirects have been in place for 3 years. Search Console frequently showing old HTML (at least a year old) in cache despite a recent crawl date and a current 301. Search Console frequently processing old HTML (at least a year old) when reporting on schema. Search Console is sometimes selecting pages from the old domain as the canonical of a URL of an existing page of the current domain, despite a long-standing 301 and the canonicals being well configured for 3 years now. Has anyone experienced anything similar in the past? We've been doing an analysis of old SEO practices, link profile, disavow... nothing points to black hat practices and at this point we're wondering if it's just Google doing a terrible job with this particular domain.
Technical SEO | | oline1230 -
Site Map Problems or Are They?
According to webmaster tools my Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt Our site map is generically generated and encompasses all web pages, whether I have excluded them using the robots.txt file As far as I am aware this has never been an issue until recently. Is this hurting my rankings and how do I fix it? Secondly, webmaster tools says there is over 5,000 error/warnings on my site map. But site map is only 1,400 or so pages submitted. How do I see what is going on?
Technical SEO | | Professor0 -
Does it matter if I leave image links pointing to old site when I move a wordpress blog?
Hi everyone I am moving a blog from one site to another. I have all the 301 redirects etc under control, but my question has to do with image links in the blogs. The image links all point over to the old site once the posts are copied over. Is this a major problem from an SEO perspective? Lots of links pointing out to an old site? It won't matter from the users perspective as I have 'none' for the image URL, so the user will never know. I will reload all the images if necessary but boy that will be a lot of work. Or is there a shortcut? Thanks very much Wendy
Technical SEO | | Chammy0 -
Wordpress Category Archives
Wordpress question here. Can anyone tell me if there is an SEO advantage to creating a page filtered to show results from an individual category as opposed to simply linking to the category archive? The content is identical in both cases.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Track Backs how to use them
Hi i am trying to learn how to use track backs as a way to get link exposure. Cana anyone please explain to me the importance of them and how to use them please. Would i use one by putting a link back to my site or am i wrong on this. any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
If I redirect my WordPress blog to my main site, will it help my main site's SEO?
I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...
Technical SEO | | matt-145670 -
What are the pros and cons of moving one site onto a subdomain of another site?
Two sites. One has weaker sales. What would the benefits and problems for SEO of moving the weak site from its own domain to a subdomain of the stronger site?
Technical SEO | | GriffinHansen0