21 Feb Website Migration Checklist: 8 Essential Steps for a Smooth & SEO-Friendly Transition
As your business grows, your website requirements and needs often do, too. Your site may be more complex now than it was before — or you may have rebranded or acquired additional businesses. All of these can call for a website migration.
Website migration can be a complex process, and if it is not done properly, it can create some problematic consequences for your site and your business.
A website migration roadmap in the form of a step-by-step website migration checklist is critical to safeguarding your site’s structure and health while avoiding negative SEO impact.
What Is a Website Migration?
You may think of a website migration as moving a site from one hosting environment to another. But it’s important to realize that website migration can also refer to multiple other things that encompass the changing of a site’s structure, design, content, and/or technology to the extent that it could affect a site’s health and SEO.
Types of Website Migrations
Here are some of the most common types of website migrations.
- Domain Migration: Changing a website’s domain name and URL — or merging or consolidating domains.
- Hosting Migration: Moving a website to a different hosting provider or server.
- Platform Migration: Switching to a new content management system (CMS); this could look like a website migration from WordPress to Shopify or from Wix to Squarespace.
- Design Migration: Implementing a new template or design to enhance the aesthetics and brand identity of your website; this may or may not impact your site’s infrastructure.
- UX Migration: Making changes to the website’s structure, navigation, or other functionality to ensure a better user experience.
- Structural Migration: Modifying website architecture, URLs, or categories.
- HTTPS Migration: Moving from HTTP to HTTPS to enhance a website’s security.
- Content or Taxonomy Migration: The transfer or reclassification of website content, which could include merging, deleting, and/or updating pages and moving posts to new categories.
Why a Website Migration Roadmap Matters
While there are multiple types of website migrations, it goes without saying that this can be a complex process that is often technical and involves many moving parts. It is also a process that comes with many advantages but also some potential drawbacks, especially if done improperly.
Pros of a Website Migration
When done correctly, a website migration is often a key to remarkable improvements in your site — and your business — especially if your current site is not working optimally for your goals and future growth.
There are many advantages to gain with a migration, including:
- Elevated visual aesthetic
- Enhanced UX and functionality
- Advanced features
- New revenue streams
- Better customer retention
- Improved security
Potential Cons of a Website Migration
When done incorrectly — and without a website migration roadmap — you do run the risk of some pretty serious disadvantages, including:
- Reduced organic traffic and search rankings
- Decreased visibility
- Broken site functionality
- 404 errors
- Poor user experience
- Indexing issues with search engines
- Decreased revenue and customer retention
- Lack of mobile responsiveness
By following a website migration roadmap that includes a checklist for both site structure and health as well as SEO, you can reduce these potential risks and complete a smooth and successful migration while maintaining your search rankings and optimizing user experience.
Your Essential Website Migration Checklist for Success
Consult this eight-step website migration checklist to ensure the transition of your site is as successful as possible while reducing downtime and safeguarding your site health and website migration SEO performance.
1. Create a Plan
A website migration is a team sport and involves multiple stakeholders. Before you begin the process, you’ll want to have your business goals in place while establishing the scope of the migration and your timeline for completion. You may even want to bring in website migration experts to help with the process — depending on how complex your migration is.
2. Perform a Full Site Audit and Establish a Content Map
Before you press “go” on your website migration process, you’ll want to dig in and thoroughly analyze your current site’s architecture while identifying any problematic issues. This also includes mapping out all your page structures and URLs.
You’ll also want to map out all your content and pages — and set up a new content map, especially if this is one of the elements that is being changed or upgraded significantly.
3. Establish Benchmarks
Because reduced SEO can be one of the most significant drawbacks of a poorly executed site migration, it’s crucial to benchmark current SEO performance and metrics. To help with this process, you can consult Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other SEO tools.
Here are some of the metrics you’ll want to document as comparison benchmarks once your migration is completed:
- Organic traffic: Look at how many visitors enter your site via search engines and your distribution of site traffic across different pages.
- Organic ranking: Investigate which pages are ranking for your target keywords and in which SERP position.
- Indexable URLs: An indexable URL is a web page that can be crawled and indexed by search engines — meaning, they actually appear in search results. So, it’s important to know how many of your URLs are currently indexable.
- Site structure and site speed: Note these metrics to ensure site functionality doesn’t decline.
4. Make Sure You Have a Site Backup
In the website migration process, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. For that reason, make sure to back up your existing site, including all data, files, and configurations. That way, if you need to restore anything, you have it available.
5. Optimize Your SEO
SEO website migration is the perfect time to maintain and even improve your on-page SEO factors. There may be enhancements you can make while also ensuring that you maintain appropriate and effective page titles, meta descriptions, and tags along with alt text and structured data.
6. Test on a Staging Site
One of the biggest “hacks” to a successful website migration is to set up a staging site — this is your testing ground to dress-rehearse every single piece of your “new” site before publishing it and going live.
In this staging environment, you can check for the following:
- Broken links: Links that no longer work are common in a website migration; make sure to check all your internal links and backlinks.
- Redirects: Crawl your redirects to ensure they go to the correct URL and there are no server errors.
- User experience: Ensure the site’s UX and overall functionality with navigation, forms, and page elements is up to par.
- Aesthetics: Review the appearance of your site and confirm it is on brand.
- Mobile responsiveness: Make sure the design and UX is responsive on mobile.
7. Submit Your Sitemap
Once you have fully tested your site and it’s live, you’ll want to update your XML sitemaps and submit them to Google Search Console.
Also, don’t forget to update your robots.txt file. This tells website crawlers which parts of the site to access — and if it’s not accurately configured, certain sections or pages of your site could be invisible or blocked for search engines.
8. Track, Assess and Refine
Remember those benchmarks you established? They will be put to use here. Once a website migration is complete, the work isn’t quite over! It’s important to keep tracking your analytics and assessing site performance against your original benchmarks. You’ll want to look at traffic fluctuations and see if you’re noticing any declines. You’ll also want to continually assess if there are any errors found in Google Search Console.
Continuing to track and fix any issues will ensure your website migration continues to be a success.
The Value of Website Migration Experts
A website migration is often a complex process that involves multiple steps on the road to a successful newly migrated site. It can also be a risky endeavor because there are some potentially negative consequences for an improperly migrated site.
While this website migration roadmap and che cklist is helpful, you may want to bring in some additional support with website migration experts.
The Threadgill Agency offers a full suite of services that includes website migration, web development, and SEO, in addition to digital strategy, content marketing, engagement, paid media, and analytics tracking.
With our agency on your side, you can ensure optimal site health and structure while maintaining and optimizing SEO during a website migration.