Is a site with 1,500 pages, (1000 of which are E-Commerce Pages) Too Big to Migrate to WordPress?

Question

This is my first post here, so be gentle if my question is stupid :)

I have a potential client who has a site with about 1500 pages, 1000 of which are product pages for an online store. To give you a better idea, it's a dermatologists' site whose main offerings are obviously the doctors services, but they also sell some skin products on the site.

The site is currently written in ASP and I really, really want to migrate it to Word Press so I can edit content easily, do SEO easier, automate things like Google Analytics tracking code installation rather than manually put the piece of code in each page, etc, etc., etc.

A couple of questions...

1.) Is the site too large to move to WordPress?

2.) If I move the site to WordPress, should I go ahead and plan on moving the site to a better hosting server?

3.) How hard is it to migrate a site like this? Unless it's as easy as using an FTP client and moving the files around, I'd really like to hire someone to do it. What type of fees would I be looking at to have someone professionally migrate the site?

4.) Lastly, if you think this is a bad idea, what alternative might you suggest?

Thanks ahead of time for all the help! I look forward to getting to know some folks around here.

Answer 1

1. 1500 pages aren’t that much. Performance problems may appear if you choose a bad permalink setting.

2. Do not trust the official requirements. I suggest PHP 5.3+, MySQL 5.1.51+, and at least 128 MB RAM.

3. The main problem is usually the structure of the old database. If you are able to write a good importer, it shouldn’t be that hard. Make sure your old URLs are mapped to the new WordPress permalink settings. There are plugins , and WordPress has a field _wp_old_slug for some cases, but I’d recommend a a solution via .htaccess/httpd.conf and mod_rewrite. The price depends on your dead line, the complexity of the theme and much more. :) I wouldn’t take less than 2500 € (~3250 US$). Ask on jobs.wordpress.net

4. WordPress isn’t made for stores. There are many plugins … but first make tests to see if they meet your needs. You may combine an online shop system like OsCommerce, Magento or Zen Cart with WordPress. In the long run, that could save you much work.