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Moving a website without rebuilding it

The usual way to change platforms is to start again from a template and lose a decade of pages. The other way is to copy what you have, exactly, and edit from there.

Ask anyone who has moved a website what it was like and you will hear the same story. Weeks of rebuilding pages in a new template. Links that stopped working. A search ranking that fell off a cliff because every address changed.

Keep the addresses

Addresses are where the value is. Every link anyone ever made to your site points at an address, and every one of those links is a reason Google trusts you. A move that changes the addresses throws that away. So the copier keeps them: /services/carpet.html becomes /services/carpet, and the front page becomes the home page.

Keep the look

The second thing people lose is the look they had. A copied page here is kept exactly as it was, not rebuilt from a template that is nearly the same. You can change it — that is the point of moving — but you change it from where you were, not from a blank.

Look before you leap

The copier shows you any page copied, walled off from everything else and with nothing saved anywhere, before you have an account. If it does not look right, you have lost nothing. If it does, you sign up and keep it.