Importing Blogs

Before Go Live (for WCS):

If your client’s old blog is on Wordpress, you’re in luck! You won’t have to manually recreate each post, but can instead directly import the old blog.

In order to import the old blog to your fareharbor.me site, follow these steps:

1. Ask the Account Manager to get the client’s current Wordpress site log-in information.
2. Log in to their Wordpress site & navigate to Tools > Export.
3. From here, you should see a list of different types of files you can export. First select Media & click Download Export File. This will download an xml file.
4. Navigate to your new Fareharbor.me site and go to Tools > Import.
5. Import this Media XML file. Note: It’s important to always import the media before you import the blog, or else the blog will be missing its images.
6. Once the media file has uploaded, navigate back to the old Wordpress site & once again go to Tools > Export.
7. Select Posts and click Download Export File.
8. Go back to your Fareharbor.me site, and upload this XML file under Tools > Import.
9. Once these import tasks are completed, your blog import is complete.
10. In order to follow SEO best practices for the blog, navigate to Settings > Permalinks and select Custom Structure. Your blog url structure should be the following: /[blogname]/%postname%/.
    1. E.g. If your blog is just named “blog” your structure would be /blog/%postname%/.
    2. If your blog is named something else, like “News,” your structure would be /news/%postname%/ etc.

Why We Nest Blogs

We want to make sure we update the blog URLs so that we are following SEO best practices. The proper nesting structure is: /blog-name/post-title/. For example, if a site’s blog is the “Pirates Blog” and the article is titled “Our Favorite Fan Photos from 2018”, then the URL would look like:

https://example.com/pirates-blog/our-favorite-fan-photos-from-2018/

It can also just be nested under /blog/.

A few reasons why correctly nesting blog URLs is important for SEO:

• Clean URL structures are user friendly; a well-crafted URL provides both humans and search engines an easy-to-understand indication of what the destination page will be about.
• URLs containing dates may be viewed by Google as outdated content, which in turn hurts rankings.
• It allows SEO strategists to quickly identify blog pages during future crawls of the website, which in turn makes it easier to diagnose problems and make changes to specific pages.

Lastly, tell SEO at go live that they will need to do their part (below).

After Go Live (for SEO):

SEO runs a technical audit on the site:

• If there are not too many errors, fix the errors in Wordpress
• If there are a lot of errors:
  1. Export the XML file from WP
  2. Open XML file in a text editor – Sublime, VSCode are 2 good ones
  3. Find and replace all the mixed content
     1. If there are links with http://domain.com change to https://domain.com
        1. Make sure the URL you change it to is in fact a URL on the site (if the URL is redirected change it to the new URL, if the URL is 404ing, change it to the appropriate URL for the site)
  4. Fix any URLs & images that are 404ing
  5. Once all the errors are fixed, delete the blog posts off the site and upload the updated XML file
  6. Run another technical audit, fix more errors if necessary