Moving some content from one site to another new domain

If you don’t mind doing it manually, copying/pasting 20 articles might be manageable.

Something to consider for larger migrations is bulk-editing the ones you want to migrate away to add a temporary category like “Migration A” and then using the WordPress Export tool, filtered by the category.

That should make it easier to bulk delete them on the origin site. Then, you can delete just the category on the receiving site.

Always a good idea to practice tasks like this on staging environments to make sure it all works as expected.

“map out old URLS to new ones for the content batch”

Yes, sounds right for reference on the next step.

“implement 301’s on my old site to new for each article URL. switch over any internal links as well on new site.”

This sounds right. This can be done with a WordPress plugin like Redirection. There are other ways of redirecting outside of WordPress like with .htaccess or with your DNS provider.

“Also is GSC change of address even necessary or just best practice?”

I would say it’s not necessary because the 301 directive instructs everyone (and not just one search engine) “hey, this URL is permanently here now.”

I don’t know much about GSC to say if it’s a best practice or not. I guess it can’t hurt although Google should get the hint eventually the next time it crawls your site and notices the 301 redirects.

Hi,

OK great, thanks for your response, yes manual is not too bad as halfway done now anyway. Just don’t want to hurt the other content on my original site A, shouldn’t be a problem hopefully

I have a similar issue, please help.
I moved all (1500) posts from one category to a new domain.
now I have a lot of 404 errors for posts and images.

Trying to use Redirection, so I’m on the 404 page, bulk selected all 404s, now can I use this code in Target URL: New domain/(.*) to move them all over to the new domain or will this wreck my website?

@ Will Bill The general process I used is to use a free 301 redirect plugin (must be installed on the old domain) to set up individual 301 redirect instructions for all posts (I understand that’s going to be a lot of work for 1500 posts though). I’ve not any experience in auto bulk redirecting – I’ve only ever used a plugin to set up individual 301 redirects and as long as you do them correctly, there shouldn’t be an issue.

A free plugin to do this are Simple 301 redirects and there’s others as well.

If you’ve already done exactly this and are getting 404 errors, the only thing I can think of is some kind of Regex edit, where it’s picking up one URL has a / at the end and the other doesn’t or something like that. Make sure the plugin you use has the “Regex” option enabled to account for this. Other than that I don’t know why it’s not working I’m afraid.

Thanx for the prompt reply bus5ojp, yes I noticed you had a few, and the manual was not that big of a deal, however, as you can imagine I would not like to waste a week lol.

I noticed the redirecting plugin By John Godley was highly regarded by many online and it has Regex capability but I have no idea what Regex is. or what I could potentially damage with it.

Hi,
As far as I understand, the Regex function just allows redirects to go through with very slight variations in the URL, such as a / at the end.

For example url1.com to url2.com shouldn’t be any issue if it’s literally identical, but what about url.com/ (slash at the end) to url.com (no slash), or vice versa.

Enabling regex I think just allows these redirects to also go through without 404 errors if that’s what’s causing them. I’m definitely no expert though so consult an expert on this, perhaps if one of the other plugins like the one you mentioned has support, contact them and confirm this is what the feature does and that it won’t cause any other problems.

Good luck however you decide to do it.