The Ultimate Website Migration Guide: Boost SEO & Avoid Pitfalls

Website migration is the process of making major changes to a website, which include platform layout, content, architecture, location, or UX of the website, all constitute site migration. The purpose of this transformation is to enhance user experience, improve performance, or address business needs. Site migrations can improve your rankings on SERPs by addressing technical issues, keeping up to date with evolving search algorithms, and optimizing website structure and content for improved visibility. 

How to create a website migration checklist 

A guide to creating an SEO website migration checklist:

• Create your SEO Migration Plan – Planning reduces the risk of issues cropping up during the site migration process.
• Mapping URLs – You’ll need to map old URLs to new URLs if you’re changing your URL structure or domain that can help you to set up the necessary redirects and update links.
• Finish the Migration – Try to time your new website’s go-live, and any migration-related declines will have less of an impact. It’s also a good idea to start early in the day and week, so your team is available to fix any issues.
• Track the website – After your migration, you can monitor the performance, so if there are any issues, you can identify improvements.

Tips to consider during website migration 

A site migration requires careful planning and execution. You can consider these common tips during site migration:

Make a proper plan

Begin your journey with an assessment of your current platform and an understanding of your client’s needs. This process will help you to identify gaps, set objectives so that you can formulate a detailed plan. It’s very important to identify issues by doing a comprehensive technical audit of the technical infrastructure of the existing websites, including server configuration, codebase, and third-party integrations. You can include the key partners – such as developers, SEO specialists, and content creators to get a thorough audit of the website. A good team from diverse backgrounds will help you to anticipate potential challenges and make sure you have contingency plans in place to overcome them.

Create Your SEO Migration Plan

Running a technical SEO audit on your site lets you fix potentially harmful errors. This includes mapping out and implementing 301 redirects for all relevant URLs, including old pages, canonical variations, and subdomains, which can result in broken links and loss of search engine authority. When doing an SEO audit, you can focus on areas such as meta tags, meta description, title tags, and header tags; if you fail to notice these areas your migration might diminish site visibility and click-through rates in search engine results pages. After your SEO Website migration audit is ready, look at your Site score to get a general sense of how your new site might perform. 

Allow your staging site to be indexed

If you migrated to a new server/hosting provider, you won’t want to index your staging site URLs, but it can occur due to process gaps. You can cancel your old hosting when Google finishes indexing your new website. 

Forgetting to update the robots.txt file, your staging site could end up getting indexed by Google, which means it might show up in search results. Here are the most common problems such as:

1. People might see an incomplete version of your site when they visit.
2. Google doesn’t support duplicate content, so if your staging site shows up in SERPs, it could impact the ranking of your real site.

To avoid this, you can use a rule in your robots.txt file to tell crawlers not to access your staging site. For extra security, you can also block certain IP addresses or add password protection. These steps will keep your staging site safe from showing up in search results.

Conclusion

If you notice anything wrong with the way your audience is behaving, then Website Migration should be approached with valid caution. At w3era, our digital marketing experts have done different kinds of migrations and have assisted many clients. Diminishing performance for conversion rates, bounce rates, and exit rates could mean that your audience is facing barriers in the journey. 

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