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Even if you are a WordPress expert, and have strategically opted for SEO, Adwords, well-curated textual and visual content, there is yet a chance you may need to add all content from another website to your website. These situations can arise when you realize one of your blogs is not generating enough rewards but the content is too valuable and you can choose to merge it with your performing website. You can also takeover/purchase/loan someone’s blog and choose to merge it with yours for greater effectiveness, time efficiency and monetary constraints of investing in two blogs.

Rather than optimizing 2 websites, creating content for 2 websites and marketing 2 websites, you would probably opt to unite them into one single website. Make sure you have backups of both these websites.

so that if anything goes wrong while attempting to export and import data, you have data to get back to. Below is a step-by-step guide to teach you how to migrate all content from your old website to your new website, without the slightest of harm to your applied SEO – 

Step 1 –

Exporting Content from the WordPress website that you want to close down – Head to your WordPress dashboard and click on Tools followed by Export. Now make sure you choose whether you want only your posts, individual pages or media. As we are merging 2 complete websites here, choose the all content option. Up next click on the Download Export File button and WordPress will begin the installation of an XML (Extensible Markup Language) file. This XML file will contain all textual and visual (except images) WordPress data with existing customizations and SEO intact. 

Step 2 –

Importing the exported file to merge websites – Head to the WordPress dashboard of your new website and prepare to import the XML file that was generated in the previous step. Click on tools followed by the import tab and then click on install now to download the WordPress importer. A notification will pop up mentioning “Importer installed successfully. Run importer”. Click on run importer and choose the XML file. This will take care of all textual matter on your old WordPress website – posts, articles, blogs, contact forms, customized headers, etc. Once the correct file has been chosen, click on Upload file and import.

Step 3 – 

Assigning an author for this new content – The WordPress development company,sector has laid immense emphasis on security and authorization of WordPress webpages. If step 2 successfully led to the importing of the old WordPress content, then you will be prompted to assign a new author or assign this section to an existing author. Ideally, if you are not sure about what you are doing, assign the admin as an author and change it later from the admin section if needed.

Make sure to check the box “Download and import file attachments” to give permission to import all data from your old website to your destination website. Once you click on submit, if all the data was imported properly then it would be visible on your new WordPress website and a message box would instantly appear, stating, ‘All done. Have fun!’.

Step 4 –

Organizing website URL Redirects – As we want our SEO to be unaffected, this proves to be the vital step. We need to access the .htaccess file on our old WordPress website with the FTP client route or via the file manager tool in your web hosting cPanel. Accessing the file from the root directory of our website lets us add code snippets as needed. Add the following code – 

Line 1 – #Options +FollowSymLinks

Line 2 – RewriteEngine on

Line 3 – RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.newwebsite.com/&1 [R=301,L]

This snippet enables 301 redirections to your website and that too with an upside of no dropping in overall SEO rankings. Although a slight drop of overall website ranking may exist.

This step ensures that if any user is trying to access your old WordPress website, they will automatically be redirected to your new website. This ensures that no amount of the website traffic is lost while maintaining almost 100 percent desired effects of the SEO rankings of the webpages.

Step 5 – 

Importing all Images from your old to the new website – Simply install all media files via an FTP tool – for example – Filezilla. Use the tag public_html and locate the root directory. A WordPress expert forum easily guides you if you are struggling to locate the root directory. All the images that you want to be uploaded onto your new website will be stored in the wp-content 🡪 uploads list. Once the files are downloaded, they can be uploaded to the FTP client. Allocating the images their accurate URLs can be easily done by the ‘Search and Replace’ plugin that can be downloaded on WordPress itself.

5 simple steps and you have easily navigated yourself through the entire task of merging 2 WordPress websites without any harm to the Search Engine Optimization techniques applied.