As a business/brand owner, you might feel the need to migrate your website for a variety of reasons.
Some of these contributing factors can be stepping up website security through another website provider, rizzing up your brand image, or even just simply enhancing your user experience!
But at the same time, there is a niggling doubt at the back of your mind where, irrespective of the reasons behind your need for website migration, you are worried about your SEO rankings, traffic, and revenue taking a nosedive!
And yes, that’s a valid concern and precisely what we will be addressing in today’s chapter on the best practices of website migration that help your website protect the SEO wealth and value that you have accumulated over the years.
Delving Into the Website Migration Process ~ A Phase-By-Phase Checklist
For ease of understanding, we will split the journey into four simple phases: planning, pre-migration, launch & post-migration.
On that note, let’s kick off with the first one!
Phase 1 ~ Planning, Setting Up the Spade Work, and the Foundation
This phase will set the tone for the rest of the journey and help you reach the end goal while preserving your rankings.
So before you step into the trenches, you need to complete these steps;
1. Define & demarcate your project scope
Begin by taking inventory of all your existing webpages and getting crystal-clear on what you are trying to accomplish with the migration & how much of the site it stands to affect.
Not having clarity and understanding of these basics, your website migration is destined to crumble like cookies.
2. Set up a dedicated migration team & decide responsibilities
It's always good to know who will hold the reins of the website migration project. Will you have an in-house SEO team or prefer to outsource the task to an SEO agency?
If you choose to go with your in-house team, it's a good idea to have a project management framework so that everyone is aware of the tasks assigned to them.
3. Ensure that the cross-department & stakeholder expectations are taken into account
The migration process will ruffle a few feathers; therefore, it's essential to identify all the departments that the process stands to affect and the stakeholders involved in the journey.
This may include a range of professional personnel such as dev teams, SEO experts, IT ninjas, designers, quality assurance testers, product designers, marketers, and content managers.
We recommend that you schedule a meeting to help stakeholders understand the need for the website migration and the end goal, and to gather their feedback on their bespoke needs, which will ultimately help you choose the right-fit CMS.
It's also a good idea to maintain transparency throughout the process and to explain what they may expect in terms of design, functionality & performance.
4. Set up your timelines & website launch date
So, ideally, it's always the smartest thing to do for your website to hit the waves when traffic is lowest, because this allows your team to address any unforeseen challenges & errors seamlessly.
In order to do that, pick a day that will probably have the least traffic or impact on your business. Go with a time slot during the scheduled off-hours or during periods with little to no business activity.
Going batch by batch might also prove to be a good move rather than migrating all the pages at once.
Phase 2 ~ Pre-Migration Rendezvous
An extension of the previous foundational stage, this is where you get the legwork done and lay the nuts and bolts for a flawlessly smooth transition, minimizing risks during or after migration.
1. Carry out a detailed risk assessment
Run a thorough & intensive audit of your webpages to identify potential problems before, during, & at the end of the migration.
These issues could include disrupted user flow, traffic loss, other technical issues, or broken links.
Once you have identified these issues, you need to step up your game and have a migration plan in place. You could check out the following techniques;
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Remember to back up all metadata, content & configurations before the migration.
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Deploy a risk-assessment matrix to anticipate & measure the risks involved in the process & its potential impact on your business goals.
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Have a staging environment in place to test the changes before the site goes live.
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Implement 301 redirects for all changed URLs to preserve SEO value.
2. Set up performance benchmarks & tracking
It's essential to gather detailed insights into your site’s existing performance so you have current benchmarks to compare your new website with.
To reiterate, it’s indeed a smart move to get your backups in place at this stage, if you ever need to restore them during the migration process.
You should have the benchmark data for the following;
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Core Web Vitals: Deploy Google’s PageSpeedInsights to gain an understanding of the metrics like user interactivity, loading speed, & visual stability.
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Server response time: Use tools like GTMetrix to check vitals, including your website's server performance and time to first byte (TTFB).
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Database performance metrics: Run a thorough check to confirm whether the database can handle the expected traffic load after migration. This may involve reviewing indexing, query execution times, etc.
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Overall website performance: Make use of Search Console, Google Analytics, or Ahrefs (any other third-party tool of your choice) to examine your existing rankings, organic traffic, crawl errors, indexed pages, backlinks, and indexing rate.
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Usability testing: Run a manual check on all the areas of importance (conversion elements) to ensure that they are working smoothly. You may choose to run A/B tests to identify pain points or conversion-deficit regions that must be addressed in the new design.
3. Ensuring that the dev and SEO team are on the same page on performance
If your website migration process requires a technical overhaul, such as a CMS change, redesign, or server migration, it is recommended that you let your developer techies know that SEO performance metrics shouldn’t take a hit due to the upheaval.
So, whether you plan to migrate to a mainstream platform like WordPress or choose to go fully bespoke, the CMS must serve SEO, not the other way around.
This is why brands often explore custom CMS development services, mainly when a la carte platforms impose limitations that don’t align well with their SEO or content strategy.
Your developers must also be able to take into consideration issues like;
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URL structure
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Canonical tags
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Internal linking
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Structured data
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Mobile responsiveness
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Page speed
We recommend comparing your SEO performance before & after the migration is complete to gain a holistic overview.
4. Set up a testing environment
A staging website helps you verify that the new site functions correctly before launching. A clone of your website can be a safe space for you to test all your functionality, such as themes, plugins, and CTAs, without disrupting operations on the live website.
This also allows you to identify & address any conflicts or potential issues before the migration process.
It goes without saying that you will need to block public access to the testing environment as well as prevent search engines from indexing the new webpages too soon.
To do that, you may either create a robots.txt file to halt search engine crawlers, add the noindex tag to your new URLs, or go for password protection (.htpasswd).
Once you are done with this, you might want to run a technical SEO audit on the staging site to identify and fix existing issues before migrating to the live website.
Phase 3 ~ Hitting Play on the Launch Button!
Now that you have a clear vision of your website migration goals and have the spadework in place to preserve SEO value, it is time to set the ball rolling and hit this one out of the park!
When you finally hit launch and begin promoting your new site, it is important that you lift any user or search engine restrictions that you might have set up during the development and staging phase, such as robots.txt disallows, no index tags, and password protection.
Your DNS records should also point to the right servers post-migration.
You might also want to consider planning PPC campaigns along with the site launch to make up for the short-term traffic dips that you might experience during the migration process.
Phase 4 ~ Post Migration
At this stage, you run a recheck of all changes to ensure everything is working as envisioned.
Here’s a quick insight into the vitals you shouldn’t miss;
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Optimize website performance
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Ensure that the technical documentation is updated
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Have basic maintenance practices firmly in place
In summary
While we understand that migrating a whole website can be a complex endeavour, adopting a phase-by-phase approach and a meticulously planned strategy can help you achieve the website of your dreams with minimized risks and preserved organic rankings!
