Note – See comment at bottom regarding Images

I have been trying to redirect people from my Blog site to my services site. This has not been going too well. Early days possibly but the count is not rising. So I thought I’d add my services to my Blog site under a header on the menu. The challenge then becomes migrating specific content from one website to another.

I did see a really good video (which i subsequently cannot find again) that discussed unindexing the old website pages and pointing them to the new pages on the new website (premium SEO plugin). I was a bit disappointed with it as it did not do anything with images or videos, which I have had issues with in the past., so moved on until I found a process that did manage the image/video issue.

This article discusses how to move specific posts across from one website to another. If you do not want to copy all the content across suggests you can do so in a single category that you can select under posts.

On the original website the content was on Product pages. So I need to change them to Posts.

On the Blog site I want the content as Pages so that I can put them under a menu header and my latest blogs appear on my homepage as normal.

Step 1. Copying articles from Product pages to Posts

I opened two tabs of the site I want to copy from, one on the Product pages showing one of the pages I want to copy, I am in “Classic Editor” rather than Gutenberg so I can have it on the TEXT tab.

I then opened a New Post Page. In the post settings I created a new Category called “export”. When I copy across the title from Product pages I added a prefix just in case I didn’t tick the new category.

As I’m in the TEXT tab, when I copy the page content across to the Post all the Image & video links come across and work (they wont if you are in Visual tab).

I had about 10 pages that I wanted to transfer from one site to another.

Step 2. Export/Import between websites

As all of the Posts that I want to transfer have same Category, I now use the export button and export posts by category . This exports to an XML file.

Go to the new website where I want to Import the files and select WordPress and import that file. It imports it in and the posts are added to the other posts. A simple enough process.

Step 3. Convert posts to Pages

In the above article it suggests using Install this Page to Post wordpress plugin “post-type-switcher“. Which I did and changed the posts to pages. So all I need to do is remove the Prefix from the titles. Viola, so thank you Hronne for your help in doing that.

I was dreading moving those pages across, but the process was quite painless.

There is still a bit of tidying up as I had a button to take viewers to a form page for requesting information. I will either have to remove that or add the button plugin into the other website. Not a major issue either way.

I also have to adjust my menu to include the new content and also do some SEO information on those pages too. And clear away the “export” category.
This was a bit of a side step to the development of my specific online ordering process which I talk about here Free Google Docs online ordering automated.

BEWARE

Update 14th Feb 2019.

On the site I migrated the pages to I was trying to access the images to put on the sidebar.

One thing I found out, when trying to find images of the migrated pages within this site’s media library, was that I couldn’t find any, and when I looked at the page source I see that the images are still associated with the previous website. I thought I’d taken care of that in the migration process. A bit scary. I will have to re-evaluate what to do about this. Fortunately my other site is still up and running, so that is OK, but its only a temporary solution. If I deleted the site the media folder with images would go too and the link broken.

I must admit, at the time when I was doing it, I was wondering how an XML file could have images in it. They need to be physically moved to the new website folder or else there is just a pointer to their original location .