Rebuilding old sites...

scottmccloud · Apr 10, 2017

I've got two domains that I now own which I am looking to rebuild their respective sites into Wordpress.

The first, I have the permission of the previous owner to use the content so ideally I'm wondering if there's some way of easily rebuilding the old site (in terms of content and structure, not necessarily design) into Wordpress?

The second, I just want to rebuild the structure of the site, as I want to put completely fresh content on there. What are the options available to do this?

I've been doing a bit of Googling and there do seem to be options available in terms of programs and services offering to rebuild sites from Archive.org but I'm not sure if they are applicable to Wordpress or indeed if they are any good.

Any ideas would be greatly welcomed.

Thanks!

Adam H · Apr 10, 2017

I've done this before with permission from previous owners and used these guys to scrape archive.org and convert to wordpress. Obviously its not 100% fool proof as archive.org doesn't necessarily scrape all pages and all pictures etc but there are plenty of plugins out there which you can use to correct everything.

https://www.waybackdownloads.com/

Think I paid something like $40 for a site with a couple of hundred blog posts and images, which to be honest is an absolute bargain as I couldnt do it for anywhere close to that.

scottmccloud · Apr 10, 2017

Thanks Adam, I'll take a look much appreciated.

When you say :

Adam H said:
but there are plenty of plugins out there which you can use to correct everything

What sort of issues are you referring to?

Once again, thanks.

Adam H · Apr 10, 2017

scottmccloud said:
What sort of issues are you referring to?

Once again, thanks.

Normal issues such as permalinks/rewrites/404's, missing images, missing featured images, links in content no longer active, embedded media that maybe now out of date and doesn't resolve.

Most of which can be fixed with search and replace plugin, plugins to set a default featured image or set the first image in the post as a featured image etc.

Once you think you've covered everything, link the site up to search console, fetch as Google bot and submit to index ( and all linked URLs ) , submit a sitemap ( making sure you noindex taxonomies you wont be taking advantage of ) , add a robots.txt and then for the following days/weeks jump on any 404's that show up.

If its an aged blog with a fair bit of content it goes without saying, https straight away so you don't end up redirecting more than than once in the near future, AMP it up and use relevant schema data, all things which were possibly not used last time around and therefore giving you the best chances of recovery if its an authoritative domain.