WordPress is a script with amazing possibilities. You can virtually perform all major operations without any time-consuming processes. Imagine, you have two WordPress-based websites and would like to merge them. The purpose of merging multiple sites is to help you to reduce the work involved and in the ultimate promotion of your content across various social platforms. In this article, you will learn the steps required to merge two WordPress sites into one without compromising SEO, which is vital for the success of your website.
Reasons to Merge two WordPress Sites
There are several reasons for you to merge two WordPress sites. You would like to start a new WordPress blog by combining all your old blogs. This will help you to manage content easily. There could be a situation where one of your blogs would not perform well and would like to combine. After merging, you just need to concentrate your work on only one blog for content and promotion.
The process of merging two WordPress sites
In order to merge two WordPress websites without any impact on your website’s SEO, you should make sure of a lot of things. This step-by-step guide will help you accomplish that.
Step 1: Export Content – Old Site
You need to visit Tools > Export page from within the old WordPress site dashboard. You should select ‘All content‘ option and select ‘Download Export File‘ button. Then, you need to save the generated XML file. The file includes all your WordPress posts, pages, custom post types, categories, tags, and custom taxonomies.
Step 2: Import Content – New Site
You should login to the admin dashboard of the site, where you need to merge the content. You should select Tools > Import page option. Then, install WordPress importer by selecting Install Now link located under the WordPress section. After the installation of the WordPress importer, you should select ‘Run Importer‘ link.
The next step is to upload the export file generated from Step 1 by selecting the Choose File button. You should select the Upload file and import button to proceed. You should wait until WordPress uploads the export file and complete the analysis. You will be redirected to the import settings page after the completion of the process.
Step 3: Assign Author Name
You should assign the author name to the new site. You can also create a new author. Also select Import Attachments option to enable WordPress to automatically import media files from your old site. Select the Submit button to finish the process. You will view a message “All done. Have fun!” with the ink of your home.
You have successfully migrated an old WordPress site to a new site. You can now start blogging on the new site and promote your content.
Step 4: Verifying links and redirect
Verify the permalinks to make sure that they are working properly. You should also consider redirecting the old WordPress site to the new blog so that users visiting the old blog will be automatically redirected to your new blog. Otherwise, they will not know that you have started a new WordPress blog with old content.
While redirecting, make sure that you are using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 redirect. It will tell the search engines that the URL has been moved to a new location.
The way you redirect will depend on the type of server you used previously. For example, on an Apache server, you could use the following .htaccess rules for a proper redirect.
#Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
On NGINX, you can use the following code snippet.
if ($request_filename ~ /*){
rewrite ^ https://www.newsite.com? permanent;
}Step 5: Transferring the media
On almost every WordPress website, you have images uploaded to the wp-content/uploads folder. based on your setup and custom features, you might also have other forms of content which you might want to transfer.
Login to an FTP software and start transferring those files to the new site’s directory. Make sure to not replace any files and compare them to ensure none of the files are being replaced.
Step 6. Fixing the URLs
If you have hard-coded any URLs, especially the internal links, you will have to change the base domain. It will be tedious to manually do it for larger sites. Hence, you can use a plugin to search and replace those from your database. You can follow the method of using the Search and Replace plugin in our article on How to Search and Replace on WordPress.
Once you have completed these steps, you are almost done with the process of successfully merging your WordPress websites together.