Changing CMS For Established Site - What To Consider?

Is it too risky to change the CMS for an established site?

[Erku]

I am planning to change my cms for a 2.5 year old site with plenty of content.

Most of my traffic is organic search engine and through RSS.

What traffic related risks will I be running when changing the CMS?

1. I am considering Wordpress (light, fast, simple CMS)

2. I will keep the same URLs

3. I assume there is a way to keep the same URLs for RSS Feeds

Have you done anything like this? Has your traffick changed? Positive or negative? What has been your experience?

Merry Christmas

[ahmedtheking]

I did this once. It really depends on what your site's built on at the moment and whether you're ready to change all the content's schema to suit the new CMS's. Yes there are ways to keep links the same and no you won't notice any thing different in traffic if you do it right!

Look at what server you're on, if you're on Apache, you can make great use of it's mod_rewrite that'll allow you to keep your links as they are!

Whatever you decide to do, give your self lots of free time, do a dry run on a dummy site, such as locally on your computer or on a separate part of the site, such as a sub domain, always do the change at night and always keep a back up for when **it hits the fan!