WordPress to Ghost manually Copy&Paste and 301?

I’m just looking for some Direction for a manually Transfer of a personal Project of mine from WordPress to Ghost and the right Way to set the 301-Redirection for the Search Engines.
The whole Project has just 20 Posts, so i decided it would be easier for me to just Copy&Paste these few Post from the Editor in WordPress to Ghost and make all the necessary Changes in Ghost on the Way along by Hand. So i could optimize for some SEO too. ;-)

It’s over 5 Years that i have “transferred” a whole Installation of WordPress from one Place to another, so i’am a little rusty in that Case and that’s the Reason for me asking for some Advice along the Way. I’m totally aware of the Fact that transferring from WordPress to Ghost will alter/screw up the whole “Category Path -thingy” and of course the Comments if there are some. Doesn’t matter that much to me, so its fine.

I know that i should use a 301-Redirect from the old to the new Place of the whole Content but i have not really a Clou anymore how to do it. So maybe Someone from around here could point me in the right Direction, like a Manual or Documentation or Stuff like that?! :-)

Below you will find some (hopefully?) further useful Information:

  • What’s your URL? This is the easiest way for others to debug your issue.
    URL doesn’t matter at the Moment because it’s set to Private for a couple of Days.

  • What version of Ghost are you using?
    Will be the latest stable Version, when installed.

  • What version of WordPress are you using?
    Latest public Release.

Thank you for helping me out.

Hey @KranzKrone, so first things first make a text file with a URL list of all the blog posts and pages that you have and plan on moving form wordpress to ghost. Based on your post during the migration your post will be from example.com/category/title-of-blog-post to example.com/title-of-blog-post. so the whole thing is stright forward and you have like 90% of the process done.

  1. Make a new post in ghost put all the data make sure that the publish date is changed to the orignal date of the post
  2. (optional)at this point you will be adding all the meta data, facebook card, twitter card, tags, and experts
  3. take note of the url you will be using for the post and you can save it as a draft so you can publish all of them at once or you can just publish it it wont make a difference.

at this point you will have the original list of URLs you had and now the new list of URLs we will now make the redirect rules.

  1. go to the man page of the admin panel and click on labs at the bottom left; scrowl to the second last item redirects and download current redirects it will be a file called redirects.json and should be empty other then and opening and closing bracket and put the follow based on the sample bellow.
[
    {
        "from": "/category/title-of-blog-post/",
        "to": "/title-of-blog-post//",
        "permanent": true
    },
    {
        "from": "/category/title-of-blog-post/",
        "to": "/title-of-blog-post//",
        "permanent": false
    },
    {
        "from": "/category/title-of-blog-post/",
        "to": "/title-of-blog-post//",
        "permanent": false
    },
    {
        "from": "/category/title-of-blog-post/",
        "to": "/title-of-blog-post//",
        "permanent": true
    }
]

things to note:

  • after closing each curly bracket } you should have a comma other then the last one.
  • if the download current redirects comes with information just keep it and add the new redirects after it since it will be all in one line i recommend https://jsonlint.com/ and it should format it for easier reading.
  • the from is the old link the to is the new link and permanent is true which is a 301 redirect or false which is a 302 redirect. in this case you want to pick true

and that is all it take after you are done put the code in https://jsonlint.com/ to make sure that you will not get any errors its mostly extra/forgoten commas. and just save the file and same place as you downloaded redirects.json just upload it make sure the button turns green with a check mark and and uploaded text. if you dont get that just refresh the page and do the upload again (noticed its a bug)

now you can always add onto the redirects at anytime just follow the same steps

Let me know if that helps or if anything is unclear

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