 The future of the Yesterday's Airlines website is under threat. Please read on to understand why... PLEASE DONATE TO HELP SAVE THE WEBSITE USING THE PAYPAL DONATE BUTTON  THE PROBLEM A few weeks ago I found myself locked out of the website and although this issue was resolved in less than a day it brought into focus something that I had been stalling on - the future of the Yesterday's Airlines website. When I started the site back in 2014 I chose Weebly as the hoster. At the time they were one of the two biggest website builder platforms that offered a simple drag and drop style build, perfect for someone who didn't want the hassle of learning to code.  Unfortunately, in 2018 Weebly was acquired by Square and in the following years they gradually transitioned away from the platform towards their own Squarespace one. In recent years the Weebly website builder has had no upgrades or bug fixes and it is only a matter of time until they close the entire thing, or access is lost to the website builder components. Both would be a disaster and I really should have probably done something earlier to forestall this. The reason I haven't is that, as with other sites like Wix who provide builders, I am effectively locked in. Even Square themselves have provided no meaningful way to migrate to their platform from Weebly - let alone anyone else. Site migration is effectively impossible in any standard way.  Over the past few weeks I have spent a lot of time investigating this. The tools that in theory exist (like weeblytowp) simply don't work and nobody offers a migration process. Basically the 'solution' is to copy/paste the entire site somewhere else! That is not at all practical as the site has over 500 pages on it, and that doesn't include the 3 blogs which have probably at least another 600+. Then there are about 30,000 image files too. I had already in recent times been focusing more on the YouTube channel but the website remains an important area for longer form content like reviews and histories that don't fit on social media or video channels. The thought of losing 10+ years of content and effort is gut-wrenching for me. A NEW SITE? The obvious path forward is to create a new website using WordPress, which will provide a viable future path as it is a platform that can be migrated and is used for about 45% of all websites. This does nothing to solve the content problem - there cannot be two yesterdaysairlines.coms and it is only a matter of months I suspect before Weebly disappears.  Also learning WordPress is not simple. It is a lot more complex than Weebly. I have spent the past few weeks teaching myself the platform and think I have got a decent new site up and running. To do that I have had to find a new hosting provider obviously, but this way I can at least continue some form of the site, albeit without any existing content. CONTENT MIGRATION? A new site doesn't help with the data. Copy/pasting even a fraction of the content on the old site to a new one would take forever. Every individual paragraph needs to be copied to a new container in WordPress on a page that needs to be recreated. Then you need to rebuild the menus, add SEO tags, url redirects. Then for every image I would need to find the original file, add it into WordPress, search for it and add it in the correct location. Repeating those steps 30,000 plus times would take years. A SOLUTION Fortunately, there does appear to be another option. I have engaged with a website design company and they have been very generous in spending days of their own time investigating what is possible in terms of a bespoke migration. I have been able to get a form of export from Weebly, although the format of this is 100% incompatible with WordPress and it doesn't include any of the 3 blogs on the site. After a couple of weeks they have presented me with a solution that is better than I could have hoped when we first spoke. They have built a mechanism to enable migration of non-blog website pages, including text and images, to the new site keeping the page structure intact but using WordPress own structure so content can still be edited ongoing. There are however restrictions: a) I can't take everything - there are simply too many pages b) It doesn't include any of the hundreds of blog pages Even with this method I will need to rebuild the site back-end and do a lot of tidying. I have already started going through the site deleting pages that I feel are obsolete or not core to the site's purpose with an eye to a possible migration. I'm focusing on keeping:
What this won't include are any of the aviation history articles, model reviews, model news (including wishlists) as these are all in blog form. They would still need to be manually moved. Tests have shown that I can replicate about 3-4 model review posts in the new site manually in an hour, but with around 250 in the current site that is a massive task timewise. Aviation history blog articles are even more numerous. WHAT TO DO What has been described above as already taken me 50+ hours in the past 2 weeks and is obviously not free. The company I've been working with have kindly not charged me for their time and efforts yet, but if I wish to proceed with the data migration the cost is £2,280 including VAT (about $3,083). That doesn't include the roughly £220 I have paid already to find a new host to test the new website. Current advertising revenue from the site covers the existing hosting only and will never get anywhere near this figure so I need to decide whether I can pay for it or whether the site is lost. If you find the work I have done over the past decade useful and if you wish to contribute then donations are welcome and appreciated and can be made using the PayPal button on the homepage (accessed through the below) or at the top left of this blogpost. Hopefully Yesterday's Airlines.com will continue on in 2026. 
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I'm Richard Stretton, an aviation enthusiast and major collector of 400 scale model aircraft. This blog discusses ongoing events in the world of 400 scale. This site is free. Please donate to keep it going.
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