Moving sites and redirects

I’ve been working on a revamp of our current website - http://uimagine.edu.au/ and moving it from Wordpress to Jekyll. At the moment the wordpress site is installed at root of the domain where as the new site is all in a subfolder http://uimagine.edu.au/uimagine-website/.

So my question is - what’s the best way to transition from the old to the new?

As part of this process I’d like to archive the old site and place it in it’s own directory, preferably as a static site.

I know I’ll need to use a redirect - the subdirectory might help with that - but I’m not 100% sure on how it will affect the new site or the right way to deploy it exactly. I’m also curious about how the redirect will affect my links in Jekyll - as they are running off the {{ site.baseurl }} of /uimagine-website. It’s not a big deal to change that but I am aware that might create some issues.

Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated before I start pulling levers and cables next week :slight_smile:

Usually we recommend the cloning tool if the install is in Installatron https://forums.reclaimhosting.com/t/easy-site-cloning-within-installatron/274. That will duplicate it to a new location. Alternatively if you want to turn it into a static site I like Sitesucker, there’s a thread on those methods at Archiving Wordpress Sites as Static HTML. Redirects may be a bit trickier. You can do redirects in cPanel (it’s essentially a GUI interface for basic .htaccess Rewrite rules) https://forums.reclaimhosting.com/t/setting-up-redirects-in-cpanel/1636. If the URLs follow a pattern you can setup what’s called a wildcard redirect in there so that oldurl.com/thispath goes to newurl.com/thispath automatically. But if the permalinks for pages have new names you may have to do things more manually with a separate redirect rule for each page.

Thanks Tim! I’ve cloned the site over to uimagine.edu.au/old-site and it seems to be working. I’ll need to play around with site sucker some more before going down the static route.

In terms of next steps - should I setup a redirect for uimagine.edu.au to uimagine.edu.au/uimagine-website and then delete the old site with Installatron? At the moment the root is a bit of mess with the associated WP files - so assuming using Installatron might clean that up a bit.

Personally I would delete the old site which should clear out the WP stuff and move the Jekyll one into the main directory. Would make for cleaner URLs to not have /uimagine-website in there. Then you can setup the redirects.