Migrating Your Website to WordPress from Any other Platform

As per latest reports, Almost 31 % of all the websites on internet are powered by WordPress. WordPress is increasingly becoming the content management system (CMS) of choice for all kinds of users. But what about the websites which have been built without a CMS? Is the process of migrating to WordPress very difficult and time consuming? The answer to this question is that migrating a website over to WordPress is actually much easier than what you think. In this article, I will discuss about the migration process and i will also tell you about some of the challenges you might face. 

First think is that if you have decided to do HTML to wordpress migration and want to migrate your current website into WordPress then it is a wise choice. WordPress is trusted by millions of people and businesses from all over the world. Now I will tell you about the detailed overview of how to go for this migration from any website to WordPress.



Migrating from Another CMS

If your website is already based on a CMS then you can use a WordPress plugin for migration process. You can check the WordPress Plugin Repository or look for some online tutorials.


Migrating from a Static Website

The task of manually migrating your website to WordPress is bit difficult and very important. By this you will get the following benefits :-

● You will have greater control over your site’s content.

● Migrating your site manually to WordPress will give you a solid understanding of WordPress features.

Building a Migration Plan
WordPress stores content in the form of posts and pages and organizes them using categories and tags. Thus the aim of our content reorganization plan is to structure it in terms of posts and pages and categorize them using tags and categories.

We will plan our new WordPress website Development under the following headings:-

● Reorganize Existing Content
● Choose the Right Web Hosting
● Plan New Site Structure
● Keep Track of SEO changes
● Contact Forms and Spam
● Pick a Theme
● Backups
● Security

How to Do the WordPress Migration Process?

Below is the step by step process of WordPress migration plan:-

● Take a Backup of your current website.

● If you are installing WordPress in the same web host then create a maintenance page and rename is to index.html.

● Now install a fresh copy of WordPress.

● If you had created an index.html file in previous step then delete it now.

● Just log in to your WordPres dashboard and disable search engine visibility. This will prevent your content from the search engines until you organize your website properly.

● Now start importing the content from your previous CMS. Learn from the official WordPress codex to learn how to migrate from your CMS to WordPress. 

● If you have been using a static site then you have to do it manually. You need to copy paste each page in your old website. Understand the difference between posts and pages as it will help you to organize your content better.

● Now after your content is imported you have to structure it. Create the required categories, sub-categories, widgets, tags and menus. After that organize your content accordingly. With this your content importing is completed.

● Now install the WordPress theme and the important plugins. Also install a contact form, anti-spam, backup and security plugin. You don’t need to install SEO plugin as WordPress’ inbuilt SEO is quite powerful itself.

● Now run and check your website through the Google Mobile Friendly Test and Page load Test. If the results are good that means your chosen WordPress theme is also good. This completes your quality assurance test.

● Now build a sitemap. Sitemaps are important part of any website. After you finish structuring your content, you can use any available sitemap generating plugin to quickly generate a sitemap of your WordPress site.

● Now fix all of the broken links.

Finally just go live and enable search engine visibility.

Conclusion

We have just discussed the overview and the process of doing WordPress migration. If you have made this decision of migrating to WordPress site then it is your one of the best decision. WordPress offers so many benefits and it can easily handle all of the requirements of a web master and website owner. After migrating, your WordPress site will definitely give you fruitful results and will bring more visitors and potential customers to your WordPress site thus boosting your business.

A Guide for Converting Your PSD to WordPress Theme

Right now WordPress powers around 27% of all the websites on internet. Such a high popularity of WordPress is due to the fact that it offers lots of benefits to the website owners as well as to the visitors. If you still have not decided whether to switch to WordPress or not then we suggest you to do this quickly if you are really serious about doing something big and impactful in your online business or blog through the WordPress website. For this, first you need to have PSD files which are created by Adobe Photoshop. After that you can Convert PSD files into WordPress Themes. But converting PSD into WordPress can be a bit tricky if you don’t know how to do it. This article can help you in this regard. Here we will discuss the important points you need to know or the steps you need to take while converting your PSD into pixel perfect WordPress website. 

● Slicing Your PSD file

The process of converting your PSD to WordPress theme starts with slicing your PSD file and dividing it into Separate image files so that each of the design component is carefully saved as a separate design file. You can use photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop to slice your PSD files. Also you should plan for what are the things which you will need to load as an image in your webpages. You have to try to optimize the images and determine what needs to be static and what needs to be dynamic.
Slicing will give you these components:-

● Background
● header and separator
● Footer and others

You should be very careful while slicing your components and it should be pixel perfect otherwise the final page will have the problem.

● Creating Index.html and Style.css

In this step, you will reach the programming part from the designing part and it is very simple. From the PSD design which you have created, now create a static HTML and CSS template and name the files index.html and Style.css for future use. Although you can use Software tools like Dreamweaver to do this step but learning a bit of HTML and CSS will also be very helpful. You can learn the basic tutorials from the websites like W3Schools, TutPlus or developer communities.  Now place your images and sliced up components at the right positions with the help of index.html and the related CSS file. You should follow a responsive web design to make sure that your site looks good and works on all the screens.

● Break Down Your index.html into WordPress theme file structure

Now you have basic template which you need to be ported to WordPress. WordPress has a file structure which you need to follow. You have to upload your web pages to WordPress themes and the plugins and more functionalities can be added. Hence go by WordPress standard file structure and break your index.html file into required .php files. Two major files in WordPress theme are index.php and style.css. There are also many PHP files like header.php, archive.php, sidebar.php, footer.php etc.

Basic files of WordPress theme

● index.php
● header.php
● sidebar.php
● footer.php

Some more related files are:-

● style.css
● rtl.css
● index.php
● comments.php
● front-page.php
● home.php
● single.php
● page.php
● category.php
● tag.php
● date.php
● archive.php
● search.php
● attachment.php
● image.php
● 404.php

● Add WordPress tags

Now import the amazing inbuilt functionalities provided in WordPress into your theme files with the help of WordPress tags. After adding these tags, you can say that you have created a WordPress theme.

Now follow the below given link to know the available WordPress template tags:-

 http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags

Now place all of the files into a single folder and place it inside the /wp-content/themes/folder which you can found in your WordPress installation.
Now activate your custom theme from WordPress dashbaord.

● Add Functionalities

Till now you have created your own custom WordPress theme from a PSD file. Now you can dd more functionalities to your theme by installing various plugins. You can learn JavaScript to add more features to your theme.

Conclusion

We have just discussed the simple process of converting a PSD template into a WordPress theme. Although the process is simple but if you find it little tricky then you can take help of expert WordPress developers. A developer who is experienced, skilled and has more knowledge of themes will certainly convert your PSD file into a high performance WordPress website.