Website Migration: A Guide to SEO Success
Ready to give your website a major upgrade without losing your hard-earned search rankings? You’re in the right place!
Our comprehensive site migration guide will walk you through everything you need to know about website migration – from planning to execution & beyond.
What’s Inside Our 3-Part Guide?
We’ll break down our proven website migration strategy into three manageable phases:
Part 1: Pre-Launch Checklist
Learn how to map your site structure, create redirect strategies, enhance your metadata & gather crucial analytics data before the big move.
Part 2: Your Launch Day Playbook
Master the art of testing redirects, monitoring site status, verifying site integrity & updating Search Console settings during the transition.
Part 3: Post-Migration Success
Discover how to track performance, fix potential issues & ensure your new site maintains (or even improves) its search visibility.
What Is Website Migration & Why Does It Matter?
A site migration needs to happen when your website changes considerably. This could be in the form of a rebuild, redesign or relocation. Let’s look a bit more closer at these 3 common reasons:
Rebuild & Redesign
As your business grows & evolves, there comes a time when you need to transform your website.
You may wish to change your website design because of company changes or to better optimise your website.
Rebuilding or redesigning your website usually means tweaking its structure. So, involving an SEO expert in the early planning stages ensures that your site will be designed to optimise your SEO performance & customer journey.
Location
Think of this as moving your digital house for example switching from WooCommerce to Shopify.
There are multiple reasons why you would need to this, including:
- improve site speed & performance
- enhance site security
- upgrade site technology
- increase platform capacity
The Hidden Cost of a Bad Site Migration
Let’s be real: botching a website migration can cause serious headaches for your business. The last thing you want is for your rankings and reputation to crumble because of a hasty move.
Business Risks
- Lost revenue
- Damaged brand reputation
- Compliance issues
- Security vulnerabilities
SEO Impact
- Loss of search rankings
- Decrease in visbility
- Broken backlinks
- Incomplete analytics data
Customer Experience
- Customers experiencing errors
- Slow-loading pages
- Missing content
- High bounce rates from customer frustrations
The Golden Opportunities of a Strategic Site Migration
When done right, a website migration isn’t just about maintaining the status quo – this is your chance to outperform your previous site.
Here’s what you can achieve:
Better Search Performance
By involving an SEO expert in the early stages of your migration project you can implement SEO best practices throughout your site that will set you up for success:
- Increase organic traffic
- Maintain domain authority
- Enhance content quality
- Streamline site architecture
Delighted Customers
A properly planned migration strategy will have the customer experience at its heart.
- Easier customer journey
- Intuitive navigation
- Faster page loads
- Better accessibility
- Optimised across all devices
Stronger Business Results
A successful migration can lead to better business opportunities & overall cost savings.
- Increased conversions
- Lower maintenance costs
- Improved efficiency
- Future-proof scalability
- Enhanced security
Pre-Migration:
Your Step-By-Step Checklist
The first phase of a successful migration strategy is the pre-migration. Use this opportunity to carry out a technical health check, collect data & do a content audit. This will give you a good understanding of what, on your existing site, is valuable & where there are issues that need fixing so your new site can outperform.
Pre-Migration SEO Checklist
- Verify Google Search Console access
- Complete Site Crawl – a full list of all internal pages & redirects on the current domain.
- Do a Site Crawl – use a tool that emulates how search engines crawl your site.
- Download Critical Data
- indexed pages
- non-indexed pages
- errors report
- most linked page
- Backlink & Broken Backlink profile
- Create your Migration Map
- Gather GA4 URLs
- Gather all URLs into 1 spreadsheet & de-dupe
- Add in the current redirects file
- Map your old URLs to new URLs
- Crawl & test your development site
Why These Steps Matter
Site Crawling Benefits
- Creates a site inventory
- Identifies valuable pages
- Uncovers technical issues
- Guides redirect planning
Why download indexed & non-indexed pages?
An indexed page is one that search engines have crawled & can show in search results; non-indexed pages aren’t crawled. Knowing both is crucial!
Collecting the URLs of both indexed & non-indexed pages gives you a complete inventory of all your content. This will help you with:
- Data preservation
- Redirect planning
- Improving content
Why download your errors report?
This report highlights existing technical problems, like 404 errors and server issues. Fix them before migration for a smooth transition & an improved technical SEO performance.
Why download your most linked pages?
Your most linked pages are your website’s VIPs – these are the pages other sites love to link to. Before you migrate your site, make sure these popular pages get special attention so you can keep that hard-earned search engine trust.
Why download your backlink & broken backlink profile?
Broken backlinks happen when a page is deleted or moved without a forwarding address & it can hurt your search rankings & customer experience.
By checking your backlinks profile you can create a redirects list. This way customers will automatically be sent to the right place on your new site.
Why download Google Analytics 4 URLs?
Your website move is another perfect time to do a content audit. Think of it as decluttering before moving house – why pack & move stuff you no longer need?
With your content audit you can identify the content to prune, improve, consolidate & keep.
Analytics Deep Dive
- Preserves SEO value
- Prioritises important content
- Fixes existing problems
- Improves customer experience
Redirect Mapping
Redirects are essential for migration, any pages left behind on your old site will result in a damaging 404 error.
The ideal is to map your URLs 1-to-1. But if a page is no longer on your new site, redirect it to the most relevant alternative. Think: a discontinued polo neck jumper going to the “Tops” category.
Now, 1-to-1 mapping can be time-consuming, especially on bigger sites. And, as a heads up, a lot of redirects can slow down your site’s server. So, here’s the trick: use redirect rules this will group URLs that fit a pattern & match them to their correct destination.
Make your Next Migration a Success
With the right migration plan & a dash of digital know-how a successful website migration is within your grasp.
Follow our guide & look out for the next part to learn what you need to do on launch day.
And don’t forget to get in touch with us if you need more support to launch your new website.
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