Every now and then, you need to move your website from one environment to another. That can mean shifting to a new domain name, a new host or a new content management system (CMS). Doing so can result in losing search engine rankings or authority, which is where proper SEO website migration comes in.
This is a practice designed to migrate website information across to the new environment, while ensuring the site can continue to perform properly as it was before. This blog will dig into the elements of the process, so you can properly plan for a migration or seek out the best website migration service you can find.
Causes and reasoning for SEO website migration
Before you actually start the process, it’s important to understand what the primary reasons for a website migration are.
- A new domain name, e.g. going from olddomain.com to newdomain.com
- Updating the structure of the URL address e.g. shifting from HTTP to HTTPS
- Switching to a new CMS e.g. going from WordPress to Shopify
- A major website redesign can necessitate migration services
- New hosting can impact site functionality and speed, resulting in SEO losses
A lack of proper migration can result in significantly less organic traffic and search rankings, as engines will need to re-crawl, re-index and understand website changes. You could also lose link authority or links might break (404 errors), with duplicate content resulting in SEO reprimands.
The website migration SEO checklist
Now you understand why a migration needs to take place, you need to know the basic steps of pulling it off smoothly.
- Planning & auditing. Define your goals, communicate with your team and audit your current performance. This means reviewing the best value pages and content on your site, crawling for all URLs, checking for backlinks and doing a technical audit.
- SEO planning. You need to map out your old URLs to the new ones, decide what’s going to change/remain, consider any new structuring (hierarchy, internal linking, etc.), optimise the content on new pages and ensure that your new site covers technical SEO bases.
- Development & staging. Build a new private version of the site, incorporating all the SEO elements and implementations. Make sure to test and crawl the site for any broken links or missing elements, blocking search engine indexing throughout.
- Launch the site. Now is the time to make the website live and ready for visitors, with all redirects active, all internal links updated, the XML sitemap updated and the Robots.txt updated. After this, you need to keep a close eye on performance and site uptime.
- Ongoing monitoring. After the site is live, you need to use crawling tools, the Google Search Console and other KPI tools to monitor traffic and issues going forward – addressing them as quickly as possible.
These are the core processes that you’ll have to enact or expect from a website migration SEO service. Some core principles to keep in mind include:
- Not changing too much at once
- Prioritise user experience above all else
- Keep everyone informed throughout the process
- Have a fallback/rollback plan in case of migration issues
- Patience is a virtue in these processes
By keeping these principles in mind, you can trust that your migration will be smooth and your new website will be able to maintain its quality and smoothness. Approached properly, you could even improve the SEO value of your new platform.
Remember, if you don’t understand the technicalities of SEO website migration or backend technology as a whole, you can always outsource the process. A strong SEO marketing team will cover all the outlined bases and more, so you can set up your new site with minimal risk.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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