Website Migration SEO Best Practices To Preserve Rankings And Avoid Common Pitfalls via @sejournal, @AdamHeitzman

There are respective reasons to migrate your website. They mightiness beryllium to heighten website information done different hosting provider, update your marque image, oregon amended your idiosyncratic experience.

Whatever the reason, you’ll request to travel a migration process that allows you to update your tract without compromising your SEO rankings, traffic, and revenue.

Many SEO professionals look a communal fearfulness erstwhile it comes to website migration: the nonaccomplishment of invaluable traffic, rankings, and users during the transition.

A migration strategy prevents information loss, show dips, and downtime erstwhile you determination your tract to a caller domain, hosting platform, oregon CMS.

In this guide, I’ll locomotion you done the 16 champion practices for a palmy website migration.

The Website Migration Process: A 16-Step Checklist

I’ll interruption down each the tasks into 3 phases: planning, pre-migration, and post-migration phase.

Phase 1: Planning

As with immoderate multi-dimensional project, your website migration needs thorough planning. Complete these steps earlier you statesman development:

1. Define Project Scope

First, instrumentality inventory of each your webpages. What are you trying to execute with the migration, and however overmuch of the tract volition it affect?

Your website migration is acceptable to neglect if you don’t person a well-defined extremity and scope.

2. Set Migration Team And Responsibilities

Who volition pb the project? The in-house SEO squad oregon an outsourced SEO agency?

If you’re managing the task internally, beryllium definite to acceptable up a task absorption model truthful everyone tin support tabs connected tasks that beryllium to them.

3. Manage Cross-Department And Stakeholder Expectations

Which different departments volition the task impact? Identify each stakeholders progressive successful the migration process.

Alongside the SEO and dev teams, this often includes designers, IT staff, prime assurance testers, contented managers, merchandise designers, and marketers.

It each depends connected what your institution is and however galore section needs to beryllium progressive successful an enactment similar website migration.

You tin docket a gathering to explicate wherefore you request it and what you purpose to achieve. This is besides an fantabulous accidental to stitchery feedback connected their circumstantial needs, which could assistance you take a amended domain (or CMS) that serves your aboriginal needs.

Tip: Be transparent astir the migration process and what they should expect successful presumption of functionality, design, and performance.

4. Define Your Timelines And Launch Date

Ideally, your caller tract should spell unrecorded erstwhile tract postulation is astatine its lowest, and your squad has the capableness to respond to immoderate unforeseen hiccups.

Choose a time that has the slightest interaction connected your business. This tin beryllium during off-hours oregon erstwhile you person small to nary debased concern activity.

You tin besides bash it batch by batch alternatively than migrate each your pages astatine once.

Phase 2: Pre-Migration Stage

This is an hold of the readying stage. It’s wherever you acceptable the instauration for a creaseless modulation and minimize during oregon post-migration risks.

5. Run A Detailed Risk Assessment

Audit your webpages to spot imaginable issues before, during, and aft migration. This could beryllium postulation loss, disrupted idiosyncratic flow, breached links, oregon different method SEO issues.

Rank these risks by their interaction connected your concern utilizing a elemental low-medium-high scale, past tackle the astir captious first.

Then, make an effectual mitigation program to minimize the severity of the risks. Some effectual techniques are:

• Backup each content, meta-data, and configurations earlier migration.
• Use a risk appraisal matrix to measurement the risks progressive successful the website migration process and its interaction connected your concern goals.
• Use a staging situation to trial changes earlier it goes live.
• Implement 301 redirects for each the changed URLs to support their SEO value.

6. Define Performance Benchmarks And Set Up Tracking

Build a elaborate representation of your site’s existing show truthful you person thing to comparison your caller tract with.

At this stage, it’s a bully thought to backmost up your existing tract successful lawsuit you request to reconstruct it during the migration process. You’ll privation to propulsion benchmark information for the following:

• Core Web Vitals: Use Google’s PageSpeedInsights to measurement metrics similar loading speed, idiosyncratic interactivity, and ocular stability.
• Server Response Time: Tools similar GTMetrix fto you spot vitals specified arsenic the clip to archetypal byte (TTFB) and the wide show of your website server.
• Database Performance Metrics: Analyze database show to guarantee that it tin grip the expected postulation loads post-migration. This whitethorn necessitate reviewing query execution times, indexing, etc.
• Usability Testing: Manually cheque retired each the cardinal areas (conversion elements) to guarantee they’re moving effectively. You tin run A/B tests to place conversion-deficient areas oregon symptom points that request to beryllium addressed successful the caller design.
• Overall Website Performance: Use Google Analytics, Search Console, oregon third-party tools similar Ahrefs to measure your existent integrated traffic, rankings, indexed pages, crawl errors, indexing rate, and backlinks.

In summation to benchmarking, this is simply a bully clip to double-check that you’re tracking each your people keywords successful your rank-tracking tool.

This is (very) important arsenic it helps you cognize however overmuch traffic/rankings you lost/gained aft the migration.

7. Ensure Dev and SEO Are Aligned On Performance

If your migration involves a method overhaul (a CMS change, server migration, oregon redesign), fto your developers cognize the SEO show metrics that are important to you. This helps minimize the migration’s interaction connected your SEO performance.

These migrations mightiness necessitate a implicit mapping of aged URLs to caller ones – springiness these details to your developers, arsenic missing redirects volition vessel your rankings and impact integrated traffic.

Other issues to look retired for are:

• URL structure.
• Internal linking.
• Canonical tags.
• Mobile responsiveness.
• Structured data.
• Page speed.

Ideally, reappraisal your full SEO show earlier and aft the migration is implicit truthful that you tin comparison results.

8. Document Everything

Document each your progressive server settings and configurations earlier you migrate your website. This includes the details astir the DNS settings, CDN configurations, and hosting environment.

Server documentation has respective benefits:

• It ensures the caller server situation mirrors the aged 1 and reduces the risks of inconsistencies that whitethorn origin show issues.
• If immoderate problems originate post-migration, elaborate server documentation makes it easier for applicable teams to find, diagnose, and resoluteness them.
• It acts arsenic a broad notation for aboriginal migrations oregon server updates.

Configuration absorption tools similar Ansible, Puppet, oregon Terraform are fashionable tools for documenting server configurations successful a reusable, readable, and version-controlled format.

Version power tools similar Git tin besides beryllium utilized to way changes made and collaborate efficaciously with teams during the migration.

9. Set Up A Testing Environment

It’s champion to make your tract successful a closed investigating situation connected a abstracted server to verify the caller tract functions decently earlier launching. This is called a staging website.

It is simply a clone of your website wherever you tin effort retired each functionalities – themes, calls to action,  plugins, etc. – without disrupting operations connected the unrecorded website.

A staging website besides allows you to place and hole immoderate imaginable issues oregon conflicts earlier the migration process.

Of course, you’ll request to artifact nationalist entree to the investigating situation and forestall hunt engines from indexing your caller pages excessively soon.

You tin either make a robot.txt record to artifact hunt engines similar Google, adhd the noindex tag to your caller URLs, oregon acceptable up password extortion (.htpasswd).

It looks similar this:

Once you person this each acceptable up, tally a technical SEO audit connected the staging tract to find and hole issues earlier migrating to your unrecorded site.

Watch retired for small foxes similar broken tract links, missing alt-texts, meta titles, duplicate URLs, etc., and hole them earlier migrating to your unrecorded website.

Third-party SEO tools similar Ahrefs, Semrush, oregon Screaming Frog tin assistance you execute this.

Tip: Ensure you person a caller backup of your website aft the clone. This way, you person a mentation to revert to if needed.

10. Conduct A Content Inventory

Now, it’s clip to physique a implicit overview of your existing contented and pages.

A content inventory lets you place if thing goes missing during the migration. Moreover, creating a database of URLs volition gully your attraction to immoderate existing bugs (like breached links oregon atrocious redirects) for you to code earlier the migration.

You tin usage a operation of methods to make a broad database of your pages and contented assets, specified as:

• Pulling each your URLs with a tract crawler.
• Downloading leafage information from your CMS.
• Exporting URLs from Google Search Console.

Don’t hide that tract crawlers don’t ever prime up orphan pages successful a modular crawl if they are not linked internally.

Also, beryllium definite to place your astir invaluable pages erstwhile assembling your database of URLs. High-value pages are pages with high-intent content, precocious conversion rates, precocious postulation levels, and prime backlinks.

This information helps you cognize which pages to prioritize for minimal interaction during the migration.

Finally, if you program to adhd further pages and categories to your caller site, this is the clip to cheque that they tin acceptable into your existing architecture. If not, you whitethorn request to reconsider your website structure.

Tip: Use a visual sitemap to visualize your existent website architecture and find gaps successful your contented strategy that request to beryllium filled.

Again, guarantee you’re tracking the keywords your high-value pages are ranking for. As mentioned above, this helps you to benchmark your show earlier and aft the migration process.

11. Create A Redirect Map

Next, usage your URL database to find the pages to determination to the caller site, which ones you tin merge, and the ones to drop.

Use redirect links to link your aged contented and the caller one. So, erstwhile users effort to entree the contented connected your aged page, they’re automatically redirected to the latest mentation of it.

For your redirect plan, commencement with the astir important pages you identified successful the erstwhile step.

Implement a 301 redirect for each leafage you’re moving to the caller site. For context, a 301 redirect indicates that a leafage has been moved permanently from 1 URL to another. The authorization connected the aged leafage is besides transferred to the caller site.

Technically, your URLs should constituent to the astir applicable leafage connected the caller site. For example, let’s presume you person a website (example.com) and privation to redirect to a caller location:

• Old URL: example.com/old-page
• New URL: example.com/new-page

In this case, you’ll acceptable up a 301 redirect from “example.com/old-page” to “example.com/new-page.”

Also, debar redirecting aged URLs to your caller homepage. This tin effect successful soft 404 errors, which volition dilute wide nexus equity and harm your rankings.

Instead, if you can’t place an due caller leafage to constituent to, either make a caller leafage oregon region your aged URL.

Using our erstwhile example, let’s accidental you person different URL (example.com/blog); you request to redirect it to the newer mentation of the leafage (example.com/new-page/blog).

• Old URL: example.com/blog
• New URL: example.com/new-page/blog

Then: “example.com/new-page/blog” should 301 redirect to “example.com/new-page.”

This way, each domain is redirected to the astir applicable leafage connected your website.

When you’ve completed your redirect map, stock a database of your caller URLs with your broader selling squad truthful they tin update their run links erstwhile the caller tract launches.

Tip: Cross-check your redirects connected your staging website to beryllium definite they’re not redirecting to different URL that’s redirected.

This is called concatenation redirects, and it confuses hunt motor bots erstwhile they effort to crawl and scale the page.

For champion results, guarantee your redirects are one-to-one and are ideally not going done redirect chains.

12. Run Pre-Launch Checks

Before launching your caller site, you’ll request to tally assorted checks successful your investigating situation to guarantee the caller tract functions arsenic expected.

Work with your SEO squad to corroborate if the pursuing elements conscionable the required standards:

• Test Redirects: Ensure that each redirects are correctly implemented and functioning properly. This includes checking the 301 redirects from the aged URLs to the caller ones to debar redirect chains oregon brushed 404s.
• XML Sitemap: Verify that the caller tract contains a valid XML sitemap. Use tools similar XML Sitemap Validator to cheque for errors and compliance with hunt motor requirements.
• Robots.txt File: If you’ve added a robots.txt record successful the staging file, reconfigure it to see pages you privation to scale connected the hunt engines.
• URL Structure: Review the URLs to guarantee they’re optimized with applicable keywords and travel SEO champion practices.
• Canonical URLs: Do each your canonical URLs constituent to the applicable variant of the page? Consolidate immoderate duplicates to support a wide contented hierarchy.
• Structured Data: Implement structured information (Schema markup) to assistance hunt engines recognize your pages’ contented and present affluent results to users.
• Status Codes: Check the HTTP presumption codification for each pages to guarantee they instrumentality the close responses. Address immoderate 404 errors oregon different related issues immediately.
• Internal Linking: Internal links make connections betwixt your webpages and administer nexus equity. Review each interior links to guarantee that they are intact and redirect users to the close content.
• Title Tags, Header Tags, And Meta Descriptions: Are they optimized for the close keywords? Do they travel SEO champion practices? Review and update them accordingly.

Tip: Use third-party SEO tools similar Ahrefs oregon Semrush to tally a speedy audit of your website to find immoderate SEO issues that volition go roadblocks during and aft migration.

Phase 3: Launch

Now that you’ve crossed each your Ts and dotted your Is, you tin proceed to motorboat your website.

13. Launch And Promote Your New Site

When your tract goes live, you’ll request to assistance immoderate idiosyncratic and hunt motor restrictions you acceptable up during the improvement phase. Remember, the quicker you instrumentality the migration, the better.

Your tract volition temporarily spell offline during the migration, truthful minimizing downtime volition trim the interaction connected postulation and revenue.

Remove each the limitations you’ve placed connected the staging tract truthful that hunt engines and users tin entree it. This includes robots.txt disallows, nary scale tags, and password protection.

Also, guarantee your DNS records constituent to the close servers aft migration.

It’s besides a bully thought to plan PPC campaigns to coincide with the tract launch. Not lone volition this dispersed the connection astir your caller site, but it tin besides assistance marque up for the short-term integrated postulation dips you experienced during the migration process.

Phase 4: Post-Migration

Lastly, re-check each the changes to guarantee everything is moving arsenic intended. Sometimes, the migration whitethorn not spell arsenic planned, and this is wherever you determine whether to tweak your edits oregon rotation backmost to the erstwhile website.

Let’s tally done a fewer of the vitals:

14. Optimize Your Website Performance

Monitor the caller website intimately to verify if everything is moving arsenic it should and cheque captious aspects of the site, including your caller robot.txt file, XML sitemap, redirects, usability, and analytics.

Also, cheque your website show compared with your aged site. It’s earthy to acquisition a dip successful show for a while, but arsenic the weeks spell by, your rankings and postulation should instrumentality to their archetypal levels.

To optimize your website:

• Use website caching to store content/data truthful users tin entree it faster.
• Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to trim latency and amended contented transportation time.

For champion results, minify your JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files to amended Content Delivery Network (CDN) performance. You tin besides usage IPV6 (Internet Protocol mentation 6) to amended routing ratio and trim contented transportation times.

• Optimize your database systems to amended query speed, idiosyncratic experience, and wide website performance. Best practices specified arsenic due indexing, information tables optimization, query structuring, materialized views, vertical scaling, etc., tin assistance the database grip analyzable requests without downtime.

Learn much astir database show tuning.

15. Update Technical Documentation

Now that you’ve launched your website, you request to revise your method documents to guarantee it’s close and up-to-date.

This documentation guides the migration process and tin mitigate risks specified arsenic duplicate/lost content, missing/broken links, etc.

Also, it allows for faster collaboration betwixt cross-functional teams and stakeholders. Your documentation should include:

• A spreadsheet oregon representation of your 301 redirects, including the aged and caller links.
• An updated XML sitemap that lists each indispensable pages. This is important for hunt motor indexing.
• Title tags and meta descriptions for each pages connected your site.
• A study showing show metrics earlier and aft the migration. You tin besides adhd your superior keyword rankings arsenic well.
• The authorities of your robots.txt record to guarantee lone the close pages are indexed connected the hunt results.

16. Implement Basic Maintenance Practices

Lastly, acceptable preventive attraction practices to support your website functioning decently aft the backup. This helps you drawback and resoluteness imaginable issues earlier they go a bigger problem.

Use third-party SEO tools similar Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and Semrush arsenic monitoring systems to way your show metrics and observe anomalies that impact web performance.

These tools besides springiness penetration into your idiosyncratic enactment connected your website and your wide show spot connected the hunt results.

Tip: Since migration impacts hunt and idiosyncratic experience, recrawl your caller tract to guarantee it’s performing arsenic required. And if your cardinal show indicators (KPIs) don’t improve, troubleshoot the causes. These could include:

• Pages connected your aged tract are inactive being indexed.
• Slow load times.
• Bad redirects.
• Missing interior links.

Activate circumstantial alerts connected Google Search Console to item issues that could impact show truthful you tin hole them arsenic soon arsenic they occur.

Final Thoughts

Website migration tin beryllium a analyzable undertaking.

Following the supra steps volition acceptable you up for occurrence and let you to prepare, execute, and show your migration portion minimizing associated risks.

More Resources:

• 5 Things To Consider Before A Site Migration
• A Guide To Enterprise-Level Migrations (100,000+ URLs)
• The Complete Technical SEO Audit Workbook

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