These days, migrating your old website to a new location is a relatively straightforward process. Many hosting or domain name providers will offer some kind of support service or plugin to help you migrate your site smoothly.
However, if your old site benefits from some strong SEO that helps your pages rank well and drive organic traffic, there are some additional things to bear in mind before, during and after you migrate your website. Correctly implementing Google Analytics tracking codes is crucial to ensure accurate data collection regarding traffic, conversions, and any potential issues that may arise post-launch. Additionally, Google Search Console plays a vital role in managing and monitoring website migrations, including submitting sitemaps and tracking indexation status.
Why Would You Need to Perform a Site Migration?
There are a number of reasons why you might want to migrate your website. Perhaps you have changed your hosting provider and want to move one or more of your sites to the new server. Or you may have opted for a new platform to run your site, maybe moving from WordPress to Shopify, for example. Or you may be rebranding with a new domain name and feel this is a good opportunity to migrate your old site to a new one.
It is important to thoroughly plan and manage risks to ensure a successful site migration project that maintains or enhances search visibility and traffic.
How Can Site Migrations Impact Search Engine Rankings & Traffic?
The process of moving your current site to its new location, platform, hosting, or domain etc may be technically straightforward, but there are some important behind-the-scenes issues to bear in mind, if you don’t want to lose any SEO advantages.
When migrating a site, it’s essential that you take a few steps to help search engines find your new site and ideally continue to rank any content that had been doing well on the old site. Monitoring search engine rankings during and after the migration is crucial to maintain or improve these rankings.
For example, if you have pages on your old site that rank well and get lots of traffic, by performing some basic migration checks, you can give the new site the best chance of continuing to rank well with the equivalent pages.
Without paying attention to these migration tasks, the SEO benefits of your old site may be lost in the move, which would prevent the new site from benefiting from a potential head start. This would undoubtedly lead to a reduction in organic traffic in the short term, which no website owner wants to experience. It could also prevent the new site from becoming established and well-indexed as quickly as it might have done, had you performed a few basic migration tasks. Updating internal links is also essential to maintain site functionality and optimize SEO performance.
Your Basic Website Migration Checklist
Now that you know how important it is to perform the necessary checks and tasks during the migration process, here’s a helpful checklist of the things to pay attention to in order to provide your new site with the best possible chances of ranking quickly and well.
1. Old Site Audit
Although it may seem laborious, completing an audit of your existing site will serve you well in the long run, especially if you run into any problems or you want to monitor the impact of the migration on your traffic stats.
There are a number of tools to help you audit your existing site, as well as the current SEO status. A comprehensive site crawl to gain a clear picture of the content, site structure, hierarchy and effectiveness of your old site will help you in a number of ways.
Firstly, you’ll be able to check that the site has been moved correctly, ie that the URL structure has been maintained or set up properly so nothing has got lost or broken across the entire site during the migration process.
Secondly, you’ll be able to review the impact of the migration. When you have a clear picture of the old site, it enables you to compare it with the new site, which may reveal any changes in rankings and traffic. This information is vital if you want to know the effects of the move on your SEO. (This assumes that the migration is the only change to your site.)
2. Repair Errors (Optional)
Auditing your existing site may seem like a good opportunity to tidy it up, i.e. remove unwanted content, fix broken links or orphan pages, address any site speed issues etc…
Depending on your priorities, it may be a good time to do this kind of housekeeping. If your intention is to set up the best possible version of your new site, then improving the old site before migration can make sense.
However, if you make lots of changes to the old site, you won’t be able to assess the impact of the migration on your traffic and rankings, because you won’t know which effects were from the clean-up and which were from the move. So, consider carefully what is most important to your business before you make too many changes.
3. Migration Time
Once you have completed all the auditing and checks, it’s time to perform the migration process. It’s advisable to perform a major migration during a quiet time for your website. This may be in the early hours, when your main markets are asleep. Or if your traffic is seasonal, it’s a good idea to perform the move during the quiet season for your business.
You can find out the busiest and quietest times for your website using your analytics. This will help you decide when might be the best time to switch the sites over. There’s likely to be some impact on rankings and traffic, at least in the short term, so if possible try to mitigate the impact of these losses by opting for one of the slow periods. Ensuring that search engine crawlers can efficiently index the site’s content during the migration is also crucial.
4. New Site Checks
One recommendation before you push the final button to move your old site is to check the new site before it’s live. Depending on your hosting provider or platform, you may be able to create a Staging Site or Development Site to check everything works as it should before you push it to go live.
When you’re as confident as you can be that the new site is working as it should, it’s time to make the final changes in the settings that will complete the migration.
5. Monitor Results
Once your new site is live, there’s still some work to be done, if you want to ensure you benefit from any SEO advantages of your old site. This is essentially monitoring the rankings and traffic of the new site, and comparing them to the data for the old one. (This is where that Old Site Audit will be invaluable.)
While there may be some unavoidable losses during the migration, with a clear picture of what has changed, you’re in a better position to assess any issues that could be addressed, such as redirects, broken links etc.
Migrating a website doesn’t need to be complicated, but there are some preparatory steps you can take to transfer as many SEO benefits from the old site to the new one. While these may take time, they may reap dividends in terms of preserving hard-earned rankings and organic traffic.