After 8 years of website design and development I thought I had the hang of moving a website over. It seems I was wrong! The transition to the new layout has been a disaster with missing pages, an .htaccess file that won’t cooperate and the WordPress theme falling out for no apparent reason. This has been a frustrating process and way more time-consuming than expected.

I’d like to say “at least I learned that before you move a WordPress site over you need to…” but alas, no such lesson. I’ve moved other WP sites in the recent past without any of the problems I’m experiencing today.

I do have the original site backed up *just in case* but I really want to get this now layout working so please bear with me!

And as long as I’m writing I will give you one tip that I hope helps: when pages fall out, use a 302 redirect to repoint that URL to the home page. That way the link credit for that page stays with the site and when you get that page back up you can remove the 302 redirect. This also redirects any viewers that may have the URL bookmarked to the temporary page to reduce the confusion of a 404 Page Not Found Error.

A 302 redirect lets the search engines know the page has been moved temporarily and to please come back later to find it. The format is:

Redirect 302 /page-being-moved http://www.your-domain.com/

You just replace the info as appropriate and place this line in your .htaccess file.

As of now, every page should either have a 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) redirect. If you get a 404 please let me know.

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