This post will be updated frequently as the process is still ongoing and not as smooth as I thought it would be.
Some Background Info
Our website originally built on Duda was outdated and needed a complete refresh. Whilst Duda is a good platform it has many limitations or can get super expensive with all the add-ons. Hence we decided to migrate to WordPress. Do not get me wrong, we migrated from WordPress to Duda, hoping it would make our life easier, which it did to some extent but then we had to extend the functionality relying on 3rd party add ons and it does not help, if the plugin developer never responds. So after 1 year of back and forth, we decided to migrate back to WordPress.
From Google’s point of view, the underlying technology is irrelevant, as long as the page can render.
Technology Identification
We had some very clear SEO pre-requisites that we wanted to follow:
- Clearly defined website structure.
- Only upload media (images or video) that were optimised.
- Nested headings.
- Quality content.
- Internal and external useful links.
- Extremely fast website.
The functionality we wanted from the website:
- Ability to showcase events.
- Form submissions to go directly in to our CRM.
- Ability for customers to make purchases online without using WooCommerce.
Based on this, we settled on:
- Website running on WordPress using Beaver Builder page builder.
- Plugin to showcase events.
- Forms coming from the CRM directly.
- Payment handled directly by Stripe Payment Gateway.
- Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
All this on premium versions, so if support is needed, we have easy access to it.
The Plan
Build it on a testing server we run and when it is ready, export and then import into our primary hosting.
Website Development
Overall there were no issues in this phase, apart from one major issue.
Exporting Blog Posts from Duda to WordPress
One piece of advice before you even do this. Do not do it, it is not worth the effort.
Instead of recreating the blog posts on WordPress, we wanted to check if there is a faster option. Duda allows you to export your blog posts as RSS Feeds. So we thought, we could simply export those posts from Duda and import them using RSS Import in WordPress.
We were so wrong, whilst this did work, but the posts were filled with HTML code. Here is a sample of how it looked on the front-end.