The http://www.elacommoncorelessonplans.com site began life on Weebly, and the client’s initial request related to SEO aspects. We discussed options and ended up converting the site to WordPress because;
- its easier to add new features such as Rotating Ad management, SEO, XML & HTML sitemaps
- there is a better array of design themes available
- open source systems with migration options are safer than proprietary systems in terms of busines risk management
- Cpanel hosting accounts offer better control over website statistics, email, spam, FTP, backups and additional software installations etc
Weebly is quite well engineered, but its intransigence in declining to facilite migration is – in my view -a threat to it’s users, and a liability to Weebly itself.
Migration from Weebly to WordPress
This is an awkward process as Weebly have chosen NOT to provide migration tools. Previous article on this issue indicated that Google’s RSS Reader could be used to import multiple levels of Post content – but its been discontinued. All autheors on Weebly migration articel stated that there was no mechanism for migration of page content – and this site had 200+ pages!
What I did was use MS Front Page to “import” the entire site, and then used “search and replace” to trim out repeating sections; headers, footers etc. Following that, I segmented pages into heirarchical folders and used the HTML Importer for WordPress to import the sanitised Weebly pages into an heirarchical page stucture in WordPress. Several trial and error efforts eventually resulted in a pretty good result, after which pages were manually checked for oddities.
Page last Updated on 11th August 2023 by the author Ben Kemp