Changing an existing site to Joomla for a responsive theme

[juliat72]

Following my previous thread about using a mobile site creator, I am looking at an easier way to change my entire range of sites from their existing old html, tables and css layouts to a responsive theme using Joomla as the platform and then a plugin to ensure that the pages still show with a SEF .html extension

What are your thoughts on doing this? Has anyone done it this way and are there any drawbacks to using Joomla with a forced .html extension?

[juliat72]

Does anyone use Joomla?

[tigger]

I've never used Joomla but have considered this also to rebuild an HTML site into a responsive one so would like to hear from other also

[Rasputin]

I use responsive theme in joomla for our sites.
It works very well and I am happy to recommend joomla but of course converting existing tables etc to responsive will not happen automatically just by changing to joomla, the actual html will need changing.
You can make a site responsive without joomla for example by using bootstrap.css (as used by joomla as well as others), the primary advantage of joomla is as a cms, which is much easier to manage than a basic html site, especially if lots of pages are involved.
By the way, joomla default is bootstrap v. 2 but current bootstrap version is 3: some joomla templates use this but not many, but bootstrap 3 is much better for responsive sites - search 'joomla templates bootstrap 3' or similar.

Edit: forgot to say, there is a setting within joomla where you can chhose to add a file suffix which adds .html, no need to use an external plugin

[churrasco]

I used wordpress to switch to responsive design as the website was php so no .html pages. What I did was that I picked a free bootstrap html template which was responsive and in a very similar style as the original website, created a child theme in wp and inserted wp functions into the content areas in that bootstrap template. This is done within few hours, maybe something like this is possible with joomla too.

[rish3]

Should work just fine. You can use wordpress for that as well, if you get a plugin that lets you edit permalinks.

The only advice I can think of is just general advice for moving from static to a cms...

Some CMS setups create a lot of "soft 404's", where there's a 404 page, but the response is HTTP 200 OK. Make sure it's really sending 404's.

CMS's also tend to make a lot of thin autogenerated pages, like user pages (click the byline in one of your new pages), attachment pages, etc. Make sure these have a meta robots tag to noindex them. You may need some optional Joomla plugin to do so.

Similarly, the search functionality can create pages that you might not have intended to be indexed. Noindex the search result pages.

Lastly, you may want to compare the page load times and make sure you have things tuned well. You'll almost always be slower moving from a static site to a dynamic one.

[juliat72]

I know that there is no way of just plugging in Joomla and the site would be converted, but I'm weighing up options to make it as easy to convert as possible and for others who work on the sites who don't actually code to help with the changeover.

I have worked lots with Wordpress but to my knowledge through recent research there is no plugin to add .html to everything and those that have used it have had issues.

I would disable things like the search and not have author/user pages so hopefully nothing extra would be 'found' and all meta tags would be in order.

One thing that has just come to mind is that obviously on some of our sites there are hundreds of pages and it will take some time to rebuild it so we would want to build it "offline" (in a 'hidden' folder with no access by Google) but I'm not sure how easy it would then be to move it to replace the old site - any advice on this?

[Rasputin]

It is very easy to do what you describe (use a global "noindex" setting on the test site or create it on your local pc then use a component called akeeba backup to move it between directories when necessary)

Your main challenge is remembering to remove the noindex when you move the site to 'live': it only takes 5 seconds but is important and easy to forget!

(The joomla forum is very helpful and probably better than this google section here for asking more detailed joomla questions.)

[juliat72]

I have been advised to do it "offline" using XAMPP so am in the process of installing all of that now - any further questions I'll go to the Joomla forum. Thanks for your assistance thus far :)

[Robert Charlton]

I would disable things like the search

Not sure how you meant this... whether you were referring simply to noindexing your search results pages, or whether you're talking about disabling the search feature altogether.

It's important to note that site search is considered one of the most important site features needed in a responsive design. In general when moving to responsive, not only should search not be disabled, but it should be enhanced.

Noindex the search result pages.

While I generally prefer using the noindex meta tag rather than the robots.txt to keep urls out of the serps, with regard to search results pages it's likely to be more efficient in the long run to keep all of your search results pages in a dedicated /search/ directory, and to block that directory with robots.txt.

Over time you're likely to accumulate a lot of search results pages (think urls here, unless they're requested and crawled). If you noindex all of those and they are crawled (necessary for Google to see the noindex meta), over time you may be putting a fair drain on the crawl budget of your site.

[juliat72]

Decided to keep with a normal html responsive design and change everything over manually for existing sites - but thanks for all your input, I'll try out Joomla sometime for a brand new site though

[aristotle]

If you want to get a quick report on what you need to change, stick the following code into the head of a test page:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

Upload the test page to your server, then go to [google.com...] and run the test.

Even if your page already has a responsive design, Google's tester won't pass it unless that tag is in the head.