New website, but same domain & same content

  • Hello, I need help and advice for my project.

    I have a WordPress website that is 7 years old. I have over 12,000 posts on the site, thousands of comments, thousands of pictures and around 100 pages.

    In the years, especially in the beginning, I installed and deleted a lot of plugins, changed a lot in files, did a lot of things that shouldn’t be done.

    Rookie mistake.

    I never tested with a stagung site or anything like that, but always on my live website.

    Another mistake.

    Now the time has come that too many things on my website no longer work properly or do not work at all, but they should work.

    I’ve already done everything possible that didn’t help.

    – WordPress completely reinstalled (manual via FTP)
    – uninstalled all plugins, deleted all files from FTP
    – Database cleaned up, unneeded tables removed

    I now want a complete restart, as if starting a completely fresh WordPress site. But I don’t want to lose my content or the Google rankings and I want to use the same Dimain.

    Does anyone have any suggestion how to do this? It’s like completely reformatting a Windows PC.

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Developing with WordPress topic
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  • I now want a complete restart, as if starting a completely fresh WordPress site. But I don’t want to lose my content or the Google rankings and I want to use the same Dimain.

    You will need a local development site to try things first. The way I see it, it will be a long process and you will need a lot of patience. For instance, you could install a clean WordPress (Latest version) and import only your posts. I strongly suggest to read the following resources:

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58015349/is-it-possible-to-import-the-posts-only-table-to-a-new-database

    https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/resources/two-ways-to-recover-all-your-posts-from-a-wordpress-database

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    I second a2hostingrj’s suggestion of rebuilding locally first. Once you have your new site as you wish it can be easily migrated to your production server, completely replacing the existing site. To migrate to a fresh, new installation, your site will need to be down for the process, but it could all be done in less than an hour if all goes well.

    You should make a complete backup of the old site before replacing it. You may later find the need to go back and get additional data from it.

    Of course replacing the existing means keeping the same domain name. Any new pages that utilize the same permalink as the old will inherit existing page ranking. For pages that must be renamed, if you set up 301 redirects from old to new, the new should inherit the old’s page rank.

    Migrating the DB from local to production will be even easier if you add your domain name to your local computer’s hosts file, directing such requests to the localhost IP (127.0.0.1, restart the computer after adding an entry). On that machine, it’ll be as if the local site is already on the Internet. This does mean the current live site will no longer be accessible from that computer until the hosts entry is removed. In the mean time you’d have to use a different device to access the live site. This technique saves you from having to search/replace all localhost references in the DB during migration, which isn’t really that difficult. Weigh the pros and cons to decide if this idea would work for you or not.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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