“I moved from Justia to wordpress and did not lose ranking and love having my own WP site. They key is keeping your good links. Also migrate to a good host like synthesis and use a good theme provider like studio press. Also use the Yoast SEO plugin.”
~+Robert Ottinger owner of OttingerLaw.com
Moving your site can be a nerve-wracking experience no matter where it currently resides. Many attorneys use the popular marketing and web development services of Justia. Whether you are checking out your options or deciding to make the move to a WordPress site, this post is all about the experiences others have had as well as a checklist for what you need in order to move your website from Justia when you are ready.
About Justia.com
This post isn’t meant to be one-sided and unfair but practical and factual. You can only learn so much from a company’s website so in order to get more detail on Justia’s services, we did what any other person would do to find out more. We called them.
Pros
After speaking with a consultant at Justia.com, I was able to glean the following positives from what I might get with the service.
Turn-key
The process works by Justia assigning a consult to your firm to talk with you about how you would like your website will look. In this regard, all you have to do is tell them what you want and they take it from there. They show you a mockup once it is ready and if you pull the trigger they launch it for you.
They Handle the Technical Stuff
So with a traditional website, you or whoever you hire would set up hosting and a domain name and all that backend stuff that goes along with having a website. In Justia’s case, they do that for you.
Use Your Own Domain
If you have a domain you would like to use, you can transfer it over to Justia.
Write Your Own Content
Justia.com will sell you content for your website (more on that later) but they claim you can opt not to buy it and write your own content.
They Update Back End Coding
Pretty much anything really, really technical they will take care of for you. For instance if you want to handle your own content production but don’t want to deal with nuances of handling the coding part, they will do it.
Your Website is Yours
If you are worried about getting your website files back after you term of service is up, you don’t have to. People familiar with Justia report it being very easy to get your files from them if need be.
“Justia does NOT do that, to my knowledge. In fact, I asked for my files, and they readily provided them. So, +1 for Jusita! “
~+E. Ryan Bradley owner of STLLawHelp.com
Cons
Conversely, the following are some things that may not be ideal.
No Hosting by Itself
Yes Justia handles your hosting but you are essentially locked into their service. Unlike a traditional hosting service, you aren’t paying for space, email and other technical features but an overall marketing, development and hosting package. You are required to purchase a 1 year contract (more on that too) and you can’t just purchase hosting.
1 Year Commitment
You will have to commit to one year with Justia for development and marketing services. Yes that isn’t a huge amount of time but you are locked into it. Of course long term agreements for marketing services are relatively standard even if you aren’t doing something web-based.
Picking Up and Moving Can Be Painful
In my talk with the sales rep, they claimed that you could get a copy of your website after your one year term is up however it isn’t as easy as setting up shop on another server. Its great that you can get a copy for free (especially when some other services charge you for it) but you will need some help moving your site (more on that in a moment).
An External Blog
I have heard instances where Justia allowed a blog to be a part of a website but in general they provide one that is not attached to the main domain. I’ve had the experience with some of my clients where Justia blogs are on WordPress but the main site remains hosted elsewhere.
What Does the Founder Say?
In a recent and running thread that many of the quotes in this post are gleaned from, founder of Justia Tim Stanley shares some of the innovative services the company has for its clients. One qualm that has been mentioned is that Justia isn’t doing a lot of off-site SEO. To that Stan says:
“Okay, let me run through a few things.
First we do a lot more than just host sites. We do a lot of off-site SEO and also assist with onsite SEO. Currently we have a big push of integrating all of the clients’ social media (if you are a client, please fill out the document and send it back if you have not already). We also gave detailed webinars to our website clients on Google+, G+Business/Local/Places, Facebook, LinkedIn and content writing. We have helped setup thousands of Facebook, Twitter and Google Places and Google+ Business pages. We have helped clients on mergers of Google Places with Google+Business. There will be additional Webinars this spring, and they will be good — clients should not miss them. We will be adding some just for blogging clients as well.
A few more things we do, in a somewhat random order based on the thread of this G+ post.
Google+Local Business & Places Pages
We were not late on this. We have been helping clients for years on setting up Google Place pages and have worked with them on merging these with Google+Business. We had a Justia webinar on G+Local Business pages last spring. All our website clients received multiple notices about the webinar, including a more detailed introductory email (it was not offered to blog only clients – sorry +Ron Miller ). We did not do the G+Local Business webinar in 2012 because Google was having real issues merging Google Places pages to G+Local Business pages, and it did not make sense for our clients to risk having problems by getting them focused on that before Google was ready. See http://j.st/gp for what was going on with G+Business in late 2012. We had to help some clients who had merged their Google Places and G+Business back then, and it required multiple contacts with people at Google to get anything fixed. Again, I think our timing of the Spring of 2013 was the right time to more formally present this to clients.
Yellow Pages – Name Address Phone Distribution, Updates, Verification
Our site and directories markup and distribution of NAP info is really good, and does help with Google Maps/Place/G+Local. We have direct relationships with all of the major NAP data companies and are a trusted source of quality local information. We consistently update and verify the NAP information which is then used in the major data providers and our own directories as well as distributed to Google and many other portals and yellow page sites (Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo! and thousands of other sites that use this info). This is not something we are behind on. The information provided to these NAP providers includes the URL of the website, which is also distributed to 100’s of other real yellow page Websites. Our data is also used by a number of other websites directly for building out their service directories. Obviously we also do submissions to free editorial sites as well.
Social Media
We have helped our clients with social media. As stated above we have had multiple webinars on G+, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn. For blog clients, we have helped setup Facebook and Twitter accounts and automated their feeds into their pages. We have helped many clients setup G+ individual profiles and have worked to encourage them to participate.”
~+Tim Stanley, Founder of Justia
Some of the elements Stan mentions in this quote are classic off-site SEO tactics that are still pretty effective. Even for non-lawyer specific SEO companies, business listing profiles, directories and social media are pretty standard link and presence building strategies.
Webinars are also extremely helpful. Justia sets up social profiles but doesn’t necessarily maintain them with content for clients (understandably so as that is a tedious and time consuming process). When you can educate your clients though and let them know what they can do on their own to help market their practice, you are doing them a great service.
Will Your SEO be Affected?
Perhaps the most pressing question many attorneys are asking is whether or not their hard-won rankings in search will be affected by moving their site from Justia to a WordPress. The truth is when you move a site from anywhere (even from one host to another), rankings can be threatened. If you follow best practices though, your rankings should be fine.
Percisely how your SEO could be at risk depends on what you do during the move. For example domain age and configuration can have an impact on your rankings. Will those be changing in any way? Your URL structure is the most important component to pay attention to (more on this later).
You also have to think about how your new site will perform. Will the new configuration be as good or better than the old one in terms of page load speed and information architecture?
“Any platform can be migrated to another without issue as long as everything is handled correctly (assuming you own the domain and not Justia). We recently migrated a Joomla site into WordPress for a client and it is doing extremely well in search.
It’s important to remember that a correct migration should also be seen as a chance to “modernize” the site. We’ve seen quite a few migrations where people essentially try to re-create the exact same site (in terms of look, feel, etc.) There’s no need for that and, in fact, trying to reverse engineer an outdated site into WordPress can actually lead to performance problems that will hurt the site in search.”
~+Luke Ciciliano owner of SEO-for-Lawyers.com
Sometimes new or migrated websites can exhibit strange behavior in search. A lot of SEOs call this the “Google Dance”. When new websites are found by Google, there are fluctuations in where they fall in search. This can happen even if a site’s architecutre remains completely the same and is just moved from one server to another. Most of the time though, architecture changes with new sites, especially those moved from one CMS to another as is the case with a move from Justia to WordPress.
“Having conducted around 10 such migrations I can tell you from experience that there is almost always a temporary dip in traffic as search engines get reacquainted with your site. The traffic recovery delay will depend on how well the new site is optimized relative to the old site. New sites typically mean new architecture and new ways for the search engine bots to enter and navigate through your site.
One tip: ensure that as your developers create the new site that it remains password protected and not accessible to search engines. You want to reduce the risk of duplicate, incomplete or incorrect content in the public domain.”
~+John Oliver Coffey owner of Netmidas.com
Migrating Your Website to WordPress
Since these two services offer support for databases and are run on CMSs of their own, transferring everything over should be pretty straight forward…as long as you ask the right questions. In Justia’s case, they claim that after your service period is up, you can request a copy of your website.
You should request a copy on a disc as well as a copy of the database associated with your website. The database will contain all of
your URLs and other settings important for transfering to a Wordpress CMS website.
A little tip that you probably already know as an attorney but it helps to point it out. Get an email confirmation from the start that you will be able to get a copy of the source code for your website if you want to transfer it down the road. For example an email should suffice.
Website Transfer Checklist
A website is sort of like a house of cards. As long as it remains undisturbed in its original state and changes to it are done seldom and with utmost care, everything will be fine. When you try to transfer to a new location, it doesn’t always rest on the carpet in the same way and many things have to be tweaked in order for it to look as it did before you moved it.
Half the battle is knowing what you need to have in place before migrating a site from Justia to WordPress.
Domain Name
If you already owned your domain name before you hooked up with Justia, you are in luck. Using it on your new website will just be a matter of changing DNS settings. If you had Justia purchase it for you, there may be some issues with using it on your new site. You will have to finish out your one year contract with Justia before you can lay claim to the domain name. Otherwise, it’s all theirs.
If you can’t get a straight answer about who is the rightful owner of the domain name or you just don’t know, there is an easy way to find out.
Step 1: Go to www.networksolutions.com/whois (note that there are many whois information providers. I just like this one because I know it and it’s easy to use).
Step 2: Copy and paste your domain name into the search box provided (just the www.example.com part of your domain. No slashes, colons or anything else. )
Step 3: After clicking search, you should get a lot of information related to who is the registrar of the domain, who owns it, and a lot of other data. The URL I used that generated the search results below is a known Findlaw client. They apparently owned their domain.
Hosting
Justia provides their own hosting. If you plan on migrating a site away from them, you’ll need to setup a hosting account. This is simply a service that stores all the files, images, etc that are your website.
Hosting is pretty cheap. Most services charge around 70-100 dollars per year or less for basic packages. If all you have is pages with images and content and perhaps a blog, you don’t need anything fancy. Popular hosting companies with easy-to-use interfaces include:
• GoDaddy
• Blue Host
• Nexcess.net
• Host gator
There are a lot of different hosts out there. The one thing you shouldn’t do is shop based on price. Instead, look at the services the host provides. Services you will need to have for a WordPress site include:
• Support for PHP version 5.2.4 or greater
• Support for MySQL 5.0 or greater
• .htaccess support and the mod_rewrite apache module
Ask a potential host if they have these features. If they can’t answer odds are you should look somewhere else. The hosts listed above all provide support for WordPress.
A Copy of WordPress
Sometimes hosts will have links to wordpress.org where you can download a copy of the open-source CMS. If you can’t find one or would like to download it yourself, you can download a zip file from wordpress.org.
A Theme
Here is a tricky part and where most of the work in transferring your site may come into play. Justia uses a proprietary CMS system so odds are their theme files will not be compatible with WordPress.
One strategy you can investigate is finding a theme that looks similar to the way your website already looks. You can then install it and have it modified to look like your old website.
A Word on HTML Scraping
I’ve seen some posts out there guiding attorneys to have someone scrape content from your Justia site if you either don’t want to pay to get the content and design code or for whatever reason you can’t get them.
As an attorney, you know full well your hands are tied on any intellectual property however HTML and CSS do not always fall into that category. Even though you can have these things copied, that doesn’t mean you will get all the code necessary to make your new site look like your old one.
Sometimes (and often with CMSs), HTML code is built by server-side processing code like PHP. This code cannot be scraped from the internet because it cannot be seen by people or software programs. It is only seen in the original HTML files that make up the site.
Your best bet is to get the original source code files from Justia so you can pass them along to your developer or re-build the site on your own.
Getting Your Team Ready
Unless you plan on doing coding and design work yourself, you’ll have to get a reputable developer and/or designer to help you. Let’s explore the intricacies of why this is necessary for a moment.
Architecture of a website
A website is basically a bunch of files all linked together through references in code. In the most basic traditional websites, HTML framework holds things like content, image tags, and code snippets for a browser to interpret.
Linked to those framework files are often other files like images, style sheets, code libraries, and other files that help the website run. Files like images, style sheets, JavaScript libraries and others are referenced in HTML documents using a file path. Those files must reside in a specific location in order for a browser to find them and render them on a screen (just like your computer looks for files on a drive when you request them).
When you request a copy of a website from Justia, the locations of the files contained in that copy are often different than what they will be once the copy of the site is installed somewhere else. For instance images in those files might be stored in a folder called images/justia-cms/yourlogo.jpg.
Once your website is installed on your server, that file (yourlogo.jpg) will have to be stored inside a folder named justia-cms which would in turn be installed in a folder called images in order for a browser to make your logo appear on a web page. Typically, when websites are moved, file paths change and a developer will have to dig into the code and change file paths so that images render, styling looks as it’s supposed to and all the things the site did before still work.
Design
If your developer is not a designer, you may also want to have a designer look at your site and tell you how to make it look like the one you had with your previous service. Designers are good at noting little details like drop shadows, gradients, placement and size of images, fonts and other tid-bits that lay people often overlook.
Often a lot of your styling and imagery for your website will be engrained in the code so a designer may not be as necessary as a developer when setting the site up on a new server.
URL Structure
Whether you import a database to MyPHP admin or set up your WordPress site from scratch, you will want to maintain the same URL structure as on your old website. Keep in mind that over the time you had your Justia site, links were built to it and search engines indexed your pages.
In most cases, you’ll want to maintain site / URL structure as much as possible. Try to avoid breaking links that require redirects. Usually, I recommend having a migration map that dictates URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, page content, etc.
~+Gyi Tsakalakis owner of AttorneySync.com
Your URL structure will have the largest impact on ranking in search as well as how successful (or un-successful) your move is. If you have a new site built and none of your URLs are the same as the old ones or none get redirected, you will lose traffic from old placements in SERPs.
If you change your URLs, those pages will no longer be reachable from those links. People will hit error pages and your traffic will drop. As a best practice you should make your URLs exactly the same as your old website.
If for whatever reason you cannot do this, you will need to redirect old URLs to new URLs. The following are some best practices for redirecting URLs.
• Use a 301 redirect. 301 is code for search engines and means permanent redirect.
• Redirect URLs using a server configuration file like .htaccess. WordPress also has some nice plugins for this.
• Redirect old pages to similar new pages. That means not redirecting everything to the home page of your new site.
• Once old pages have dropped out of search and links to your site have been changed, remove redirects.
Moving your site from Justia can be a smooth process as long as you know what to expect. As long as you do setup a migration map with the same title tags, URL structure, descriptions, etc..complete with necessary 301s your SEO should recover after a temporary drop. If you need help with the migration of your website contact us today.