Migrating Between Joomla and WordPress

Over the past three years, I have had to migrate sites from WordPress to Joomla and from Joomla to WordPress. There really isn’t an easy way. For the smaller sites I moved about a year ago, I learned it is best to just make the transition manually.

Here are the steps to move from Joomla to WordPress. The same process can be used the other way as well.

Joomla

1. Copy all the photos from the original site to your HDD. Rename them with SEO in mind.
   For example, pic0001.jpg can be named buffalo_wings.jpg.
2. Go to the Joomla website as a visitor, not in the admin area. (You may need to be logged in as Admin to get access to all the posts.) Choose your first category and view the first article in that category.
3. Create an OpenOffice.org (OOo) text document and name it the category you want the article to be in when you transfer it to WordPress. by the name of each WP category you want the articles to be posted in.
   (OpenOffice.org is free and has a version for MS, Mac and Linux. MS Word does not work well and may create more work than it saves.)
4. Highlight, copy and paste the whole article from Joomla. Only copy the article, not the full web page. Paste the article into OOo. The formatting won’t be exact, but don’t worry about that right now. Picture place holders may show the pictures, but they will most likely have to be edited once you get them into WordPress.
5. If you are preserving the post date, record it under each article you save. Add a spacer below the article so you can easily find the separation.
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6. Repeat this process copying each article into the appropriate category document.
7. Create a document called “Pages” and copy each of the misc. pages to it in the same way. (About us, Disclaimer, Contact Us, etc.) Form pages will have to be recreated.

When you are done, you should have one document for each category, and one for the pages.

WordPress

1. Create all the categories you will need.
2. Create a new post and go to visual mode, not html.
3. Copy and paste the article from the OOo document directly into the WP article.
4. Reattach the photos.
5. Backdate the date and time according to your preference.
6. Add the SEO options as desired.
7. Repeat the process until all articles are posted.
8. Follow a similar process for each WordPress page.
9. Backup your website!

When I did this the first time, I tried copying the HTML code from the Joomla editor to the WP editor. What I discovered was that WP tends to modify HTML code causing more work. In many cases, I had to completely remove all the formatting and reformat the entire article.

I also tried the process described above using MS Word. It turned out to be as much trouble as the HTML route.

More recently, I have been using OpenOffice.org (OOo) to copy articles from one site to another. It does a much better job at keeping the formatting. In fact, this document is being created and formatted in OOo.

Most people refer to it as “Open Office” but the proper name is OpenOffice.org and the proper abbreviation is OOo. You can guess where to find it, but here is the link anyway. OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is free and has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.