Post Migration Steps: Move from Joomla to WordPress

In the previous article, we discussed the Pre-migration and migration steps when we visited Joomla to WordPress. In this post, we will discuss the last but not the minor steps: post-migration.

Let’s go on:

After migrating the website now, you are ready to Post-migration:

After successfully switched the platforms, you need to choose a new theme for your website. While you cannot use the same template of your Joomla website unless you hire a developer to make a custom theme, you can find out something similar will work for you.

I suggest you select a fresh theme for a new website. There are many available for self-hosted WordPress, including those for free in the WordPress Theme Directory and premium ones from lots of online marketplaces.

While choosing a theme, you need to ensure that it was created with quality in mind. There are tons of poorly-coded, bloated themes that you want to stay away from. That can hinder your site’s performance, so ensure that you choose a top-notch one from the start.

Check ratings and read reviews. You need to be able to explain whether it is one you want to install or not.

After all your content migration, now is the time to recreate several items, including any menus you were using. Having a well-structured main menu is critical as it lets your visitors quickly find what they are looking for.

It is effortless to create a new menu in WordPress. Go to Appearance > Menus, and enter the name for the menu and click the Save Menu button. Next, posts, add any pages, custom links, and another thing to it.

Now you made the new menu; you can specify where it appears on the website. Themes need to use different names for the Main Menu and call it Header Menu, Top Menu, or others.

Choose where you want to display the menu by checking the appropriate box in Menu Settings.

After you choose to display your menu, save the changes. Now, preview the site to make sure the menu is where you want it.

Every theme has its different menu locations, so play around with the menus until you get them just right.

You will need to set up some contact forms on the new website. That will help people to contact you, and you can add any functionality to them.

Here are some contact plugins you can use:

Once you add contact forms to your page, it is good to check that they are working correctly. Fill them out with test information and ensure you receive submitted documents.

A widget is a content block placed in the website’s footer and sidebar, among other places. They will be added and removed in Appearance > Widgets, the Customize area, and some themes.

Among the widgets, you can add the following:

Additionally, in the widgets mentioned above, some themes have their custom widgets as well.

After activating your desired theme and choose the website’s functionality, you can add widgets that match the specific needs.

Several themes have gallery functionality built-in, but you may need to use a plugin.

There are several excellent free gallery plugins.

Keep in mind: When you add plugins, don’t just go all willy-nilly and install a boatload of them. Choose the ones as per your need and install those.

Before installing a plugin, check out the review. It is best to use plugins that are actively maintained.

Since you are optimizing your new site, it is essential to concisely ensure that you are using the permalink structure.

In the previous post, I have mentioned pre-migration steps at the beginning of this post, in which I told you to make a list of your Joomla site URLs. That only comes into play if your old site received a good amount of traffic and had many backlinks to it.

If the website received many visitors and planned on changing the permalink structure. In that case, you want to set up redirects to the new website URLs.

To do this, you will use the Redirection plugin.

If the old website sucked and had very little traffic, don’t even worry about redirects. Just focus on attracting quality visitors to the new and improve the WordPress site.

Since you made a temporary domain to move all the content over, you will now have to move everything to the permanent domain.

If you changed to a new web hosting service, you would need to update your DNS settings with the domain name registrar. If you don’t know how to do this, google “update DNS + name of the registrar.”

Once propagation is complete, you will be able to start creating the live site.

You will need to do the following:

Since you wrote down all the old URLs, you can now redirect them to their equivalent WordPress site.

Download, then activate the Redirection plugin, and do:

If you updated the permalink structure during your move from Joomla to WordPress. In that case, you must take a look at the website’s internal links.

Go through all pages and posts edit any links to other content on your site.

If you would instead not go through every post and page manually. Install and activate any plugin for that, Like Broken Link Checker.

It will search for broken links in the website’s posts, comments, pages, and other content.

If Broken Link Checker notices any broken links, it will show them in two places:

In a Broken Link Checker widget on the WordPress dashboard

And under Tools > Broken Links.

This plugin helps you update broken links through its interface instead of navigating the source to make changes.

You can keep the Broken Link Checker plugin after you fix all the links. Still, maybe you want to deactivate it and turn it on to check broken links once in a while (like once in a month).

Also, you can thoroughly uninstall it after checking and fixing all your links and using an online tool like Online Broken Link Checker periodically instead.

Plugins that perform ongoing scans tend to slow down your site.

After the new WordPress site is up and running, you will want to make sure that everything is running correctly.

Few moves go smoothly. Your website has to load fine with all the content.

Moving a website from one CMS to another is quite a challenging task. Hopefully, this guide helps you to move the website from Joomla to WordPress.

Are you having problems with the website migration? You can comment below; we will try to help out as best we can.