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My company decided to get a new website, while retaining the same domain (e.g., mycompany.com). We are currently using Joomla (still active), and the new website will be a self-hosted WordPress. Since mycompany.com is already well-indexed in Google Webmaster Tools & Analytics, I'm sure there will be a lot of problems if I just point the mycompany.com domain to a new site. I guess a 301 redirect is certainly not an option since the whole site structure will be different.

I can expect some problems, but at least I want to minimize the impact to site ranking & index, also to real visitors. Can anyone suggest the safest way to do this?

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I guess a 301 redirect is certainly not an option since the whole site structure will be different.

But if you are coming from Joomla to WordPress, the site structure will be predictably different and thus 301 redirects are both feasible and desired. As you can see in this other question, it doesn't have to be all that complicated of a rule to accomplish the result.

That being said, you will still suffer a slight penalty from Google for changing your URLs. You can expect to lose 10-25% of referrals for a short period of time, typically a few weeks to a month, as Google reindexes your site and you may stand to gain or lose some traffic permanently as Google may recalculate your rankings during this process. Make sure you publish and register a sitemap for the WordPress site in GWT and that will minimize the penalty.

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  • Sorry. I should knew I didn't provide more details. The migration I will take is not only changing the platforms, but also the content. The new WP site (is up & running on a temp domain) has new directory structure, new content, and new database. So yes, the whole site structure will be different, because that is how the new site is designed by some guy/team in my office's headquarter. But still, I can just 301-redirect all the links in my old site's sitemap to the new site. Right? Thanks for the answer.
    – Arthz
    Commented Dec 21, 2013 at 3:12
  • Yes, 301's are still the answer here. Even if the content changes, you want to give Google (and your users) a roadmap from the old content to the new. Things will be in flux for a while as Google re-evaluates your site with the new structure and content but it should settle down soon enough.
    – JCL1178
    Commented Dec 21, 2013 at 4:43

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