“You need to migrate the website to another platform.” Whenever someone suggests this, especially for legacy websites dozens of questions start bombarding. For established businesses, it is like a dreaded dream. The questions that often arise are: Is it possible to migrate my website without losing SEO? Do I have to start everything from scratch post website migration?
Hold your thoughts for a while and just take a deep breath! It is not that difficult.
Migrating a website is often viewed as a daunting task, the site migration doesn’t have to be scary when strategized, planned, and executed properly. If done right, webbsite migration can even boost your traffic, rankings, and overall SEO performance.
Read on to learn more about what exactly is website migration, and complete pre & post site migration SEO plan.
What is Website Migration?
Website migration is a crucial process that involves making changes to your website’s structure, location, or design. Usually, businesses migrate their websites to create better experiences for their customers and improve SEO performance. Based on your project type and business requirements, you can choose from different migration options.
Types of Website Migration
The types of website migrations depend on the nature of the changes you are making:
- Domain and Hosting Changes: Rebranding, moving, merging parts of the site, or even switching hosting servers to improve speed and performance.
- Platform Changes: Move your website to a new platform, upgrade the platform version, or introduce the new platform features.
- Content Changes: Add, remove, or merge web pages and content to introduce new information.
- Structural Changes: Making changes in the website hierarchy, navigation, and internal linking to enhance user experience.
- Design and UX Changes: Modifying the design and user experience to change the look, and feel of the website.
Launching a new website feels exciting, but migration comes with concerns. With the right guidance and professional services, it’s possible to migrate websites without losing SEO. In this guide, we’ll answer your most pressing questions about website migration and show you how to avoid SEO pitfalls during the process.
Why Do You Need SEO Website Migration?
There are several reasons why you might need to migrate your website while ensuring your SEO is preserved:
Structural Changes
When businesses find an urge to reorganize the structure of web pages to enable search engines like Google to crawl the website they plan for website migration. It helps to improve user experience and makes it easier for search engines like Google to crawl and index your pages.
Security
If your business website address has HTTP and not HTTPS then you need to migrate your website to make it secure and improve the SEO performance.
Switching Server
You can migrate the website hosting to a faster and more reliable server to deliver an enhanced user experience, website performance, and load times, which are important ranking factors for SEO.
Domain Name Change
If you are rebranding your business website or moving to a new domain after an acquisition, ensure that your existing backlinks and SEO signals are preserved. Properly setting up redirects from your old domain is crucial for maintaining SEO value.
Website Migration: How Does it Impact SEO?
While website migration is important for various reasons, if you don’t consider SEO you’ll risk the following factors:
Loss of Website Traffic:
If redirects are not properly implemented, users will land on broken pages. This can result in a decline in organic traffic on your website.
Broken Links:
Outdated or broken links may harm the user experience and impact your website’s overall SEO performance negatively.
SEO Ranking:
After website migration, if search engines find duplicate content, missing metadata, or crawling errors, they may temporarily or permanently devalue your site. However, these risks can be mitigated with the right SEO strategies.
A Proactive Approach to SEO During Website Migration
Pre-Migration: Strategic Planning and Preparation
With this proactive approach, you can identify the problems early. Here are the key steps to follow for a seamless website migration process.
1. Create an SEO Migration Plan
A well-thought-out SEO migration plan comprises the following steps:
- Setting goals and objectives of site migration.
- Recording key metrics — traffic, rankings, backlinks, etc. to compare and analyze pre- and post-migration performance.
- Creating a website migration checklist and timeline to complete the migration within time.
2. Website Audit
Perform a thorough website audit using SEO tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to gather valuable insights such as:
- Website’s current position in search engine result pages (SERP)
- SEO performance of top-ranking keywords
- Organic traffic data
- High-quality backlinks
3. Create a Website Backup
Before migrating your site from one platform to another, don’t forget to create a complete website backup. Backup all files, databases, and configurations. This way, you can restore your original site if anything goes wrong during the website migration process.
4. Set a Clear Migration Goal
Determine a timeline and objective for SEO website migration. Start with smaller changes, and gradually you can ensure that everything operates smoothly. If you are planning for major changes, divide it into parts so the search engine get time to crawl and index changes progressively.
5. Website Migration Checklist
Prepare a site migration checklist covering each and every step of the process such as technical update preparation, content changes, and post-migration testing, to ensure everything is functioning properly.
6. Map Your URLs
Create a URL mapping plan to keep track of your current URLs to your new URL structure. Maintain a list of URLs to keep track of – new, redirected, and removed URLs. Use 301 redirects to guide both users and search engines to the new URLs, and ensure that no valuable pages are lost.
7. Record Benchmarks
Track and retain the website’s analytics data such as top-performing pages, traffic sources, and other key performance indicators (KPIs) before migrating your website so you can compare them after migration.
8. Maintain Meta Titles and Descriptions
While migrating a website, maintaining uniformity is important. Be sure to back up all the meta titles, descriptions, and HTML markup. This will help preserve the integrity of your pages’ SEO elements and also prevent any indexing issues.
9. Technical Migration
During site migration, consider the following points:
- Update internal links and verify your robots.txt file.
- Update the XML sitemap with the new URLs and submit it to search engines.
- Install and configure SSL certificates for HTTPS security.
- Ensure that the website is mobile-friendly and optimized for mobile-first indexing.
10. Keep Pages and Slugs Same
A slug is a part of the URL that defines the specific page. To make the navigation user-friendly, it is important to keep the page slug and web page nomenclature the same. For example, https://www.tech-prastish.com/digital-marketing-services/; in the given URL “digital marketing services” is a slug so this URL should redirect to that page only.
Post-Migration: Monitoring and Adjustment
When you finally finish the website migration process, it’s very important to analyze the website’s performance. This will help you identify and fix any key issues.
1. Monitor Analytics
Check the website analytics to see if there are any changes, like a sudden drop in traffic or SEO ranking, indicating something went wrong during website migration.
2. Track Keyword Performance
Keep an eye on key metrics like core keywords ranking, website traffic, changes in bounce rate, and conversion rate.
3. Run Audits
Run an end-to-end audit on your website to identify issues such as broken links, duplicate content, or incorrect redirects that might have been missed during the website migration process.
4. Custom 404 Pages
During the website migration process, there are chances of errors while moving and removing the pages. Besides showing a “404 error”, create custom 404 pages with helpful redirection options to guide users to the pages they want to visit.
5. Use Google Search Console
Use Google Search Consule to check your new site is being crawled correctly and submit the updated XML sitemap.
6. Annotations in Google Analytics
Use Google Analytics annotations to mark your website migration date. This helps you compare your pre- and post-migration data and understand the website migration SEO impact better.
7. Update Your Sitemap
Check and update the XML sitemap as per the new changes and submit it in Google Search Console, this will indicate Google to crawl the new website and its pages.
Need Help With Website Migration Without Losing SEO?
Website migration can be a pivotal step for businesses — and it’s even bigger when it comes to preserving SEO rankings, traffic and performance during migration. To handle such high-stakes tasks, you need expert guidance. With professional assistance, you can ensure a smooth transition without losing SEO.
For the best website migration services, you can count on Tech Prastish Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd. We have a team of website migration experts who have hands-on-experience in migrating business websites and eCommerce stores. We understand that each business is different, and so are their migration objectives. So, we follow a unique, SEO-focused website migration approach to help businesses migrate their websites seamlessly while maintaining SEO rankings and performance.
