Converting from BANS to phpBay, Method 2

Last week, I started a short series of posts about Converting a BANS site to phpbay. The first method was easy… cut your losses and start over! This post will walk through the considerations you MUST take into account when converting a busier site with a steady flow of traffic, that you do not want to disrupt and hurt your earnings during the process!

Disclaimer: When I convert my own sites, I do what works for me. If you find one of the steps below does not work for you, I encourage you to try different methods, until you find what works best for you.

Important Things to Plan For

OK – so you have a site that is somewhat busy with traffic and the last thing you want to do is disrupt the flow, and drop your earnings! BEFORE you start hacking away at the site, you MUST take into consideration that traffic and what will happen to it!

1. Which Pages are Delivering Traffic?
   Whether they come from search engines or links you have built, you need to have a list of the pages that are delivering the majority of your traffic! I do this by going back to the last FULL month of stats in cPanel (cPanel is not perfect, but it does the job) and scrolling down to the “Pages – URL” section, which shows you a list of the most popular pages.
2. Narrowing the List of Pages
   Now that you can see which pages are popular, you have to decide which you are going to build 301’s for IMMEDIATELY, and which ones you will simply handle as they generate a 404. For myself, I use a rule of 30 pageviews. If a page is not hit at least once a day, I will just leave it as-is and rebuild it when the need arises (ie: a 404 is found in the site log). The rest that generate at least one pageview per day, will have a new page created, before the transition to the new site!

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As you can see in the image above, I am not going to worry about the home page, or the admin, or sitemap page at this point. You will have a new homepage, the admin is not publicly available, and the Sitemap will be handled with a new sitemap, at the same URL.

NOW that I have a list of pages that are delivering DAILY traffic or hits, I have to plan for a new page on the new site, that they will be redirected to! You noticed I stopped at the 30 hit point… because MANY pages are below this level, and you could literally spend weeks doing nothing but creating the 301’s for the pages that truly aren’t your bread and butter!

PAY ATTENTION TO THE MOST IMPORTANT PAGES FIRST, THOSE WITH YOUR MONEY TRAFFIC!

Building the New Site in the Background!

If you are like most, your BANS store is on the root of your domain, meaning it comes up and displays directly at your main URL, www.yourwebsite.com. Since the most important factor during this conversion is our visitors and NOT disrupting them, we need to develop the new site in a new directory, and simply move it when we are done! I know this sounds daunting… but it is very simple, even for someone who has never done it!

The way WordPress works… the location of the install is maintained as a variable. So at any time, you can easily move it around, and variable just rebuilds itself. AS LONG as none of your pages are indexed, you will have no issues with the rebuild.

1. Install WordPress to a Directory
   Inside your HostGator account, login to your cPanel, go to Fantastico, and install a WordPress Blog to a /blog/ directory (This can be named anything, it is defined in step 2 of the install in fantastico). DO NOT link your new blog ANYWHERE on your public site! We are using this for development ONLY, and once it is completed and ready for public, we are simply going to replace our BANS site with the new phpBay or phpOStock site we are creating!
2. Remove ANY Ping Services During Development
   Login to your new blog admin and go to the Settings > Writing > option page, and clear the “Update Services” box at the bottom. We DO NOT want to notify ANYONE of our new site, until it is on the root and ready for viewing.
3. Install your WordPress Plugins
   Just like you would with any WordPress build, install your plugins and activate them. The only exception tot his is that you DO NOT ACTIVATE the Google Sitemaps, or Redirect plugin Yet! Here is a list of 8 plugins I use on almost every site… however, the Automatic Upgrade is no longer needed!

Now that your install is completed and you are sure nobody can find about it until YOU are ready – Build your New Site!

Pages, Posts, or What?

I can tell you that on my own sites – I am starting to use WordPress more for PAGES than posts on affiliate sites. The pages are created to have a static look and feel to them, and are much easier to control as far as visibility, than posts are. I use a hierarchical menu system just like I did with BANS sites… creating a logical and common sense menu system for visitors.

Posts on the other hand are used to provide bits of news or basic information, about the pages of content. Using a simple plugin like the  YARPP (Yet another related posts plugin) the pages will display the related posts in the blog. The Gas Furnace page at the webhvac site is a good example of how that works. Its a page, with only 4 listings, and 5 related posts (Older posts mind you) The plugin is very adjustable to get the exact posts you want showing beneath others.

1. Make sure you build a now page or post for all you +30 pages!
2. Make sure you have a good way to handle 404’s! Almost all WP themes have a 404 page, make sure it works!

Moving WordPress to the Root to Replace BANS

This is likely the part that will scare off most people – it is SUPER EASY, as long as you do it right! I just want to reiterate… you DO NOT HAVE TO DO THIS! You can simply leave the blog in a directory and run your new site from there with a simple 301 on the main home page. The only disadvantage, is that wordpress will no longer handle your 301’s with the plugin, and all will need to be created manually.

Warning: Once you click on save, you will no longer be able to access your new blog from the same address! If something goes drastically wrong (Which it wont) you CAN still edit the database through cpanel… to correct things.

1. Login and Change Blog Location
   From the main menu, choose Settings > General > and there are two boxes you need to change: WordPress address, and Blog Address. If you installed WordPress to a /blog/ folder, they will look like: http://mywebsite.com/blog. You need to remove the portion for the blogand click on save. When the page refreshes, it will show a 404 error.
2. Remove BANS and Replace it with Your Blog
   Login to your cPanel account and go to your file manager. Rename the public_html folder to something like “bans_backup” and move the /blog/ directory we created, to the root of the domain, renaming it public_html, and making the blog the new content engine on your site. Here are the offical wordpress directions for this. Keep in mind that since NONE of your new blog files have been seen by the public, you will not have to worry about changing much!

**Note: In step 2 above, I referred to the public_html folder as the root of your website. This assumes it is the ONLY domain on your hostgator account. If you are converting an add-on domain, the folder will be named according to how you named it during the original setup, which is usually some portion or all of the domain name. Bottom line.. its the ROOT folder for the domain.

Setting the New Location Options

Now that your site is being powered by WordPress – you want to get back into your admin and set a few of the things we neglected during the initial setup!

1. Go to the Settings > General > tab, and make sure the new address is correct. EVEN IF you make no changes, click on save! This will overwrite your htaccess and make sure it works properly.
2. Go to Settings > Permalinks > and make sure your permalink structure is correct. I use the date format the majority of the time… Month and name.
3. Go to Settings > Writing > and reset your RPC ping addresses. On some sites, I have had a whole list of RPC servers in here… I have found that keeping the general setting of: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ works just fine, as the WordPress plugin does the rest for you.
4. Activate your Google XML Sitemaps and Redirect plugins.
5. Make sure the 404 logging option is turned on in the redirect plugin (It IS by default, so you will not likely need to change anything)
6. Using the Redirect Plugin, add a 301 for all the pages you decided to redirect in the section above. Redirect them as: old page url > new page url.
7. Check that your 404 page works, by typing some abstract url into your browser.

Summary and Going Forward

I know the method above seems like alot to do… but the only thing that is going to take time is the creation of your 301’s in the redirect plugin. I can rip out about 45-60 per hour, as long as I have the list in front of me.

From this point forward… you can simply visit your 404 log in the redirect plugin on a daily basis, and if you see 404’s being generated for pages you already created, it is a point & click away from being taken care of! If you find 404’s for pages you did not yet create, you can choose to either create a new page/post for them, or simply 301 them to one of your existing pages.

Mark

Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:

• Changing from BANS to PhpBay – Method 1
• Converting WordPress Theme to BANS Template – FAQ
• Converting WordPress Templates to work with BANS
• Converting a WordPress Theme to work with BANS – Introduction
• Converting an Existing BANS ePN Site to a BANS PepperJam Site
• Slowly Converting Existing BANS Templates to work with WordPress
• Should you Convert a BANS Site to a PhpBay Site?

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