Introduction
Bluwing is an online blog posting site that faced some problems migrating blog posts from HubSpot to its main site, which is made in WordPress. The transition aimed to provide all the contents of Bluewing under one domain for easy management and enhanced user experience. This case study outlines the migration process, the challenges we faced, and the solutions we implemented to ensure a smooth migration.
Background
bluewing.co maintained its blog on HubSpot (blog.bluewing.co) but decided to migrate all its blogs to its primary website (bluewing.co) made in WordPress. This aimed to unify branding, improve SEO, and simplify content management for the people at Bluewing.
Migration Process
- Testing Blog imports in staging:
After exporting the blogs we needed to test importing the blogs to a WordPress site, so we set up a local WordPress blog site and imported them to that site using a plugin called WP All Import. When testing the imports of blogs everything was functioning properly. - Staging site setup:
After testing it in our local WordPress site we made a staging site of the main site to test the importing of blogs on the same environment as the main site. We used the same plugin, WP All Import, to import the blogs into the staging site. The importing process went well, as all the blogs were correctly imported to the staging site. - Exporting blogs from staging to main site:
After testing the imports of blogs in the staging site we went ahead and started the migration process of blogs from HubSpot to the main Bluewing site. We exported all the blog posts from the staging site using the plugin WP All Export, in a CSV format and imported it into the main site - Managing the redirection:
As the old blog pages were made using HubSpot, the blog listing page was in a different domain (blog.bluewing.co), and our task was to redirect all the traffic that went into that page into the new blog listing page (bluewing.co/blogs). We used nginx redirection to redirect all the traffic from the old site to the new site as the main site was hosted in AWS.
Challenges Faced and Solution Implemented
- Featured image not importing:
When importing the blog posts, we noticed that the featured image was not being imported into the blog posts. So we had to manually upload all the images to the site, open the blogs and add the featured images manually. - CSS issue:
The client wanted to have the same styling for the blogs as it was in the HubSpot blog site, but due to them being on different platforms, the styling was not the same, and most of the styling was missing on the new site. We fixed this by editing the main styles.css file in the cPanel of WordPress. We had already faced this problem when testing it out on the staging site, so we only needed to paste the CSS file from the staging site to the leading site, which solved the problem for us. - Redirection Issue:
The main problem we faced when migrating the blog posts was redirecting all the traffic from the previous page to the new page. As the previous site was hosted in HubSpot, we had no option to redirect the links to the new site from HubSpot, so we had to migrate the previous domain which is blog.bluewing.co to AWS and set nginx redirection from there. We managed to host the previous domain into AWS and we set up the redirection in that URL, and we managed to redirect all the incoming traffic to the new page, which is bluewing.co/blog. - WordPress and PHP version:
When migrating the blogs to the new site, we noticed that the main site’s WordPress and PHP versions were not updated to the latest version. So, the plugin that we were using to import the blogs was not working on the main site. So, we had to find a new plugin to import the blog posts. We found another plugin called WP Import Export Lite which had similar functionality to the previous plugin(WP All Import). We also faced a problem where some of the featured images were not being supported in the main site because they were in .webp format. Since these types of images were only supported on WordPress version 5.0 and above, and our main site was running WordPress version 4.9.25, we had to convert most of the images into .png format and upload them again. - Inbound and Outbound links:
Most of the blogs had internal links that pointed to the blogs of the same site, but after migrating, we noticed that most of them were pointing to the old site, which is blog.bluewing.co, so we used a plugin called Better Search Replace to find and replace those URL to the new URL, but after testing we found that all the inbound links were not changed and few remained so we had to manually adjust all the links through WordPress editor.
Outcome
As for the outcome of this project, it was a great success. All blog posts, along with their appropriate featured image, were successfully migrated from HubSpot to WordPress. Despite facing many problems in the process, like the WordPress version not supporting slime plugins, CSS not being set correctly, some images not being supported properly, and the main challenge, which was the redirection issue which we spent most of our time on. The team, with effective communication and attention to detail, was able to successfully complete the task within one and a half weeks. And by working in a team, we were able to successfully complete the migration and migrate all of Bluewings blogs under the same domain i.e. bluewing.co/blogs, which has made it easier for the people over at Bluewing to easily manage their content.
Conclusion
The conclusion of this case study is that the migration process of blogs from HubSpot to WordPress was a simple task, but because of the migration issue, it took a little bit more time than intended as the previous site was hosted in HubSpot, which did not include any functionality for redirection and the new site was hosted in AWS. The migration process included several steps like exporting blogs from HubSpot, creating staging sites and importing the blogs to staging sites for testing, fixing the CSS issues, exporting the blogs from staging and importing them to the main site, and setting up redirection from the old site to the new site. We also faced some challenges like the PHP version and the WordPress version being too old due to which the plugin that we were using on the staging site was not usable on the main site, and most of the images that were in .webp format were unsupported. We tackled this problem by first converting all the images that were in .webp format to .png and reuploading them to the site, and as for the WordPress and PHP versions we had to use a new plugin to import the blogs into the site. And for the featured image issue we had to manually upload all the images into the blogs which wasted a little bit of our time which could’ve gone into testing.