Steps to migrate your site from joomla to wordpress

I’m tired with the article system of joomla, I finally decided to migrate from joomla to wordpress when I understood I must install a third party joomla component to enable users to leave a comment, now I succeeded to do so, the most important thing is I migrated my site from joomla to wordpress without any down time, and no link of my site has been changed, so there won’t be any dead link after migration, now I will share how. (btw, English is not my mother language, if you feel it’s very hard to understand me, do forgive me.)

Firstly thanks to Rodney Blevins for making it possible to convert Joomla to WordPress, his import wizard can import all your old joomla articles to wordpress, Now lets go:

Tested on :

Joomla CMS v1.5

WordPress 2.7.1

I must say if you are planning to migrate joomla to wordpress on the same server, you can completely follow my steps, if you are planning to convert joomla to wordpress between different servers, you should follow me to convert joomla to wordpress on the old server then move your wordpress to the new server.

Step 1. Use your FTP to creat a new file named wp in the root of your joomla site, for example, your joomla site is under wwwroot, then creat the new file under the wwwroot, the name of the new file is not important, we will only use it for a while. Here I name it wp

Step 2. Upload wordpress to wp, install it, now the wordpress url should be http://youroldjoomlasitedomain/wp, now login to this wordpress. Go to the Administration>Settings>General panel. In the box for WordPress address (URI): change the address to your joomla site address. In the box for Blog address (URI): also change the address to your joomla site address, which should match the WordPress address (URI). Click Update Options, do not try to open/view your wordpress now!

Step 3. Access to your FTP, move all WordPress files except index.php and .htaccess to your joomla root, now you can login to wordpress administrator dashboard via http://yourjoomlaurl/wp-admin.

Step 4. On the wordpress dashboard, go to Settings>Permalinks,

if your joomla rewrite url is “http://joomlasiteurl/category-name/articleid-article-title” , for example, one of my joomla article url is “http://richspy.com/avoid-scams-on-get-paid-to-read-emails/”, you should set wordpress permerlinks like this:

/%category%/%postname%/

if your joomla rewrite url is ended with “html” or “htm”, you should set wordpress permerlinks like this:

/%category%/%postname%.html

Or /%category%/%postname%.htm

In order to make their links completely the same, now we have to install a plugin to remove the “Category base” of WordPress, download the plugin here, unzip it and transfer it to wp-content/plugins, then active this plugin on the dashboard>plugins, now the “Category base” has been removed.

Step 5. Creat wordpress categories the same as your joomla categories. Category slug in wordpress must be completely the same as it in joomla. Or there will be dead links after your migration.

Step 6. Download the >import wizard here or here. And >follow this article to import joomla data to wordpress, remember that you have already installed wordpress, and your wordpress url now is the same as joomla url. And you must import from the joomla category to its corresponding wordpress category.

Step 7. Ok, suppose you’ve converted all data from joomla to wordpress. If in your joomla site, your article url is without article id, I mean that your joomla article url is http://domain/category-name/article-title Or http://domain/category-name/article-title.html Or htm, you have finished the converting, you can skip to step 8 now.

If in your joomla site, your article url is with article id, I mean that your joomla article url is http://domain/category-name/articleid-article-title Or http://domain/category-name/articleid-article-title.html Or end with .htm, you have to manually add article id to each article slug in wordpress, because after the converting, article slug in wordpress is without article id:

Login to your joomla administration, check the article id, then go to dashboard>posts>edit, below article title, you can see a “quick edit” button, click it, you can edit the slug, add “articleid-” to the slug, for example.

Sigh, if you have many articles, it’s really a dull job, hopefully there will be a more effective way, if you find a way, do leave a comment to share with us.

Step 8: Move all joomla files (I suggest you don’t delete joomla before you are sure the migration is perfect, you can move it to another file), then move the index.php and .htaccess of WordPress from wp to the wordpress root.

Step 9: On the dashboard, go to Settings>Permalinks, don’t make any change, just click “Save changes”, we do this only to update your Permalink structure to your .htaccess file

Ok, go to surf your site, you’ve finished the migration.