If you have an existing blog, you’ll want to transfer it to PressProxy and set up the redirects so that the old blog posts redirect to the new address.
This process should take a few minutes, excluding the time spent waiting for the blog backups to be created and restored.
Step 1 – Set up PressProxy for your blog
The first step is to set up the blog proxy and hosting on PressProxy. Follow the instructions inside the dashboard, and once the setup is finished, proceed to the next step.
Step 2 – Transfer existing blog to PressProxy hosting
The next step is to copy over your old blog to the new one on PressProxy.
Backup the old blog
- Log into your old blog.
- Install and activate the plugin Backup Migration.
- Click the big green button Create backup now. Wait for the process to finish.
- Once the backup is finished, you will receive a URL. Copy it.
Restore on the new blog
- Log into your new blog on PressProxy.
- Install and activate the plugin Backup Migration.
- Go to plugin’s tab Manage and Restore Backup(s).
- Click Super-quick migration and paste the backup URL. Wait for the process to finish.
- Review that everything was copied correctly.
- Delete the plugin.
If you receive a Restore Failed error, the most common culprit is that the host server is blocking the connection. This is not a big issue, as we can upload the backup manually, which will take just a minute longer.
- Download the backup to your computer by opening the backup URL in your browser.
- Once downloaded, click Upload backup files under the plugin’s section Your saved backups.
- When the upload is finished, click the Restore button. Wait for the process to finish.
- Review that everything was copied correctly.
- Delete the plugin.
Add new sitemaps to Google Search Console
Because your blog URLs have changed, it’s important to inform Google about the new addresses. In addition to redirects, which we’ll do in the last step, you do that with a Sitemap.
- Go to Google Search Console and click Sitemaps in the sidebar.
- Find your old blog sitemaps.
If your old sitemap URL was
blog.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
… then add a new one like this:
yourdomain.com/blog/sitemap.xml
Make sure to open the URL in your browser to ensure it works.
Once you’ve added all blog-related sitemaps, delete the old ones.
New sitemap
If you don’t have a blog sitemap, install the plugin Google XML Sitemaps Generator. On activation, the sitemap is generated.
Open the sitemap in your browser:
yourdomain.com/blog/sitemap.xml
Once you’ve confirmed it works, you can add it to the Search Console.
Step 3 – Set up redirects on Cloudflare
The last step is to create redirects so that old blog post URLs redirect to the new ones. This is done in Cloudflare.
First, we need to review the subdomain configuration:
- Open Cloudflare dashboard and your website settings. Click DNS in the sidebar.
- Your old
blog.subdomain needs to have Cloudflare proxy enabled (orange cloud).
Now, we can proceed to creating redirects:
- Open Rules in the sidebar, then Redirect Rules.
- Click the blue button Create rule.
- Name it PressProxy – old blog redirects or some other descriptive name.
- Select Custom filter expression.
- Under When incoming requests match… in Field, select Hostname, then Equals. In Value, add your old blog URL,
blog.yourdomain.com - Under Then… in Type, choose Dynamic, then for Expression, enter
concat("https://yourdomain.com/blog", http.request.uri.path). Check Preserve query string. - Click Deploy.
Give it a minute, then open one of your old blog posts and confirm it redirects to the new one.
You can now delete the blog from the old server. Do not delete the subdomain DNS record since it’s needed for redirects to work.
Have problems setting it up?
No worries—we’ll be glad to help! Go to the PressProxy dashboard and click the chat beacon at the bottom right. Let us know where you got stuck, and we’ll help you out.
