How to Merge Two WordPress Sites Together Without Losing SEO

Some website owners create multiple WordPress sites but later want to merge them together. Consolidating your content into a single, powerful website can streamline your workflow and boost your SEO efforts.

Our readers regularly ask us about the best way to merge two sites without losing SEO. Luckily, WordPress comes with built-in tools to do this easily.

In this article, we will show you how to properly merge two WordPress sites together. We will cover all the important steps for a smooth transition that preserves your valuable SEO rankings.

Why Merge Two WordPress Sites Together?

There are lots of reasons someone might want to merge two or more WordPress sites together.

For example, they may want to start a new WordPress blog by combining their old blogs, which allows them to have all their content in one location.

Or perhaps one of their blogs isn’t doing so well, so they want to merge its content with one of their successful primary blogs.

Often, WordPress users decide to merge their sites simply because it takes less time and effort to maintain a single website than multiple separate WordPress installs.

Instead of running, marketing, updating, and backing up two or more sites, they can focus on maintaining and growing just one WordPress site.

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to easily merge WordPress sites together. Here are the steps you’ll need to complete:

1. Preparing for the Migration

For the sake of this tutorial, we will say that you have a secondary WordPress site at http://secondarysite.com and you want to merge it with your primary website at http://primarysite.com/.

To make sure your content transfers smoothly from one site to the other, there are a few things you need to do in preparation.

Check WordPress Media Settings

You should check your media settings to make sure that the primary site won’t reject any images from the secondary site because of their size.

First, you need to visit the Settings » Media page on both websites.

Now make sure that the Medium and Large file sizes on the primary site have maximum settings the same or greater than the settings on the secondary site.

Next, you need to visit Media » Add New on both sites to check the maximum upload file size.

You need to make sure this setting on the primary site is the same or larger than the setting on the secondary site. If it is smaller, then some of your images may not be imported.

You can learn how to change this setting in our guide on how to increase the maximum file upload size in WordPress.

Install Any Necessary Plugins

Many WordPress plugins store data. These include eCommerce plugins, membership plugins, forum plugins, and more.

If this plugin data is stored in a special database table, and that table doesn’t exist on the secondary site, then it won’t be able to be imported. So, make sure you install the plugins on the primary site before you try to import their data.

Now, plugins handle data in a variety of ways, so there is a chance that data from some plugins won’t be imported anyway. It’s very important to manually check that all your important data has been successfully imported after following this tutorial.

2. Exporting Content From the Secondary WordPress Site

Now, you are ready to export all of the content out of the secondary WordPress website.

First, you need to visit the admin area of your secondary WordPress site and then navigate to the Tools » Export page.

Make sure that you select ‘All content’ option and then click on ‘Download Export File’ button.

WordPress will immediately prepare an XML file and download it to your computer. You will need this file in the next step.

This exported file will contain the following:

• All your WordPress posts and pages
• All custom post types (if you have any)
• All categories and tags and custom taxonomies (if you have any)

3. Merging Content Into the Primary WordPress Site

Now that you have exported content from your secondary site, it is time to merge it with the content on your primary WordPress site.

Head over to the admin area of the destination site (the primary site where you want the content to be merged) and visit the Tools » Import page.

This page lists all the import tools that you can install and run on your WordPress site. Scroll down to the bottom and click on the ‘Install now’ link under WordPress.

Once the WordPress importer is installed, click the ‘Run Importer’ link to continue.

Next, you will be asked to upload the WordPress export file.

You need to click the ‘Choose File’ button and then select the XML file you downloaded earlier.

Click on the ‘Upload file and import’ button to continue.

WordPress will now upload your export file and analyze it. After that, it will redirect you to the import settings page.

It will ask you to assign authors or create new authors. You can assign the imported content to an existing user on your WordPress site or create a new author.

Next, check the box in the ‘Import Attachments’ section. This will download and import file attachments such as your images and other media files from the other website.

However, in some cases, there may be images that fail to import, so some posts may still link to images on the secondary website. We will fix this in the next step.

You can now click on the ‘Submit’ button to run the final step of the import.

WordPress will import content from your export file and add it to your primary WordPress site. Once finished, you will see a success message.

Now, this page may also display a list of items that failed to import. Often this is because the item already exists on the website, but not always.

It may be that there was a problem importing an image or that a table that exists on your secondary site doesn’t exist on your primary site. As we said earlier, this can be caused by differing image settings on the two sites, by a missing plugin, or some other issue.

You may want to take note of these failed items in case you need to manually copy them from the secondary website.

4. Importing External Images

If there were any image import problems, then some of the posts you imported might still be loading images from the secondary website. These are called ‘external images’ and are not the best for WordPress performance or SEO. We will fix that in this step.

The easiest way to import external images is to install and activate the Auto Upload Images plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

The plugin’s default import settings will work for most users, but you can change them by visiting the Settings » Auto Upload Images page. For example, if you wish to import images wider than 600px, then you will need to change the image size settings.

Next, you need to visit the Posts » All Posts page and select all of your posts so that the plugin can update any external images they contain.

You can only select the posts on one page at a time, so you will make faster progress by displaying as many posts on a page as possible.

You can do that by clicking the Screen Options button at the top of the Posts page.

You need to increase the number in the ‘Number of items per page field’ field to ‘999’ and click the ‘Apply’ button. If you are concerned your hosting provider may not be able to update that many posts at one time, then you can type in a smaller number.

WordPress will reload the page and it will list 999 posts. You can quickly select them all by clicking the checkbox next to ‘Title’.

After that, select ‘Edit’ from the Bulk actions menu and click the ‘Apply’ button.

WordPress will now show you a ‘Bulk Edit’ box with all selected posts. Make sure you don’t change any of the settings in this box.

Simply click the ‘Update’ button, and the plugin will import any external images it finds in the selected posts.

Now, if you have more than 999 posts, then you will need to visit the next page to select the remaining posts.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to import external images in WordPress.

5. Setting Up Redirects

After successfully merging content from two WordPress sites, the next step is to set up redirects so that users visiting the old site are automatically redirected to the new WordPress site.

You will need to edit the .htaccess file on the old WordPress site.

You can edit the .htaccess file by connecting to your WordPress site using an FTP client or by using the File Manager tool in your WordPress hosting dashboard’s cPanel.

The .htaccess file is located in the root folder of your website. If you can’t find it, then see our guide on why you can’t find the .htaccess file on your WordPress site to unhide it.

You need to place this code at the top of your .htaccess file:

#Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.primarysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Don’t forget to replace primarysite.com with the domain name of your primary WordPress site. Then, you need to save your changes and upload the file back to your server.

You can now visit any post URL from your secondary WordPress site, and you will be automatically redirected to the same post on the primary site.

6. Troubleshooting After Merging Two WordPress Sites

Now that you have merged your two WordPress websites, you should make sure that you’re not missing any important data and that your merged site is working as expected.

Here are some troubleshooting steps you can take.

How to Merge and Bulk Edit Categories and Tags

You may want to clean up categories and tags after merging two WordPress sites. For detailed instructions, check out our tutorial on how to merge and bulk edit categories in tags in WordPress.

How to Fix URLs Pointing to the Old Domain in Posts and Pages

All internal links in imported posts and pages will still be pointing to your old site. Since you have redirects set up, your users will still land on the correct post on your new site.

However, you still need to update URLs for improved SEO and better user experience.

Luckily, this is easy to do with the Search & Replace Everything plugin.

For step-by-step instructions, see our tutorial on how to update URLs when moving your WordPress site.

We hope this article helped you merge two WordPress sites together. You may also want to see our ultimate WordPress SEO migration checklist or our expert pick of the best WordPress migration services.

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