I'm in the process of transferring a static HTML site to a newJoomla! installation. I acquired the site a couple of months ago and immediately added Google Analytics to all 300 pages (manually!) to start tracking the traffic to the site. The main purpose was to determine how the site was currently performing, so that I could plan how I would develop it. I let the traffic stats accumulate for a little over a month.

However, there was a sneaky side benefit of accruing those traffic stats. Google Analytics can now tell me which pages are most frequently visited and and therefore which pages should get transferred to Joomla! first. After all, I want to transfer most of my traffic to my shiny new Joomla! template. What I'm doing at the moment is working down the list of most popular URLs (the ones with the highest pageviews) and I'm copying the content from the static HTML page and pasting it into a Joomla! article.

I'm making good progress - I've done maybe 25 pages out of those 300. But I've got a problem. I'm doing a little bit of this copy and paste business every day but each time I start I can't remember where I'm up to. I might remember that I've transferred 25 pages already, but the 26th URL in my list today might not be the one that was 26th yesterday. This is because the sequence of URLs changes from day to day, as the pageviews for each page fluctuate from day to day! This is where a new Google Analytics profile comes in very handy.

Google Analytics Profile

What I've done is leave the original Google Analytics code on all the static HTML pages and then create a new profile for the same site. The GA code for this new profile gets inserted into the Joomla! template and starts tracking the traffic for the new Joomla! pages. The important point is that the old profile tracks only the static HTML pages that I haven't yet transferred. Yay - a convenient way of keeping track of what pages I still need to move. Now I can continue working down my list of popular URLs shown in the original profile, secure in the knowledge that I'm looking at stats for the old pages.

There are no problems. Only challenges.