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;

• It is 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 business risk management
• Cpanel hosting accounts offer better control over website statistics, email, spam, FTP, backups, additional software installations etc

Weebly is quite well-engineered, but its intransigence in declining to facilitate migration is – in my view a threat to its users and a liability to Weebly itself.

Migration from Weebly to WordPress

This is an awkward process as Weebly has chosen NOT to provide migration tools. Previous articles on this issue indicated that Google’s RSS Reader could be used to import multiple levels of Post content – but it has been discontinued. All authors on the Weebly migration to WordPress article 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 hierarchical folders and used the HTML Importer for WordPress to import the sanitised Weebly pages into a hierarchical page structure 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 6th May 2024 by the author Ben Kemp