The whole model of online marketing undergoes a plethora of changes and modifications every day, and eventually, you are going to come across the challenges of overhauling your website and site migration. Mostly the SEO professionals use this term Website Migration to describe any substantial changes in the site’s location, platform, content, establishment, design, or UX. These changes can significantly matter in your search engine visibility.
A site migration is about the process of migrating a website from one domain to a whole different one. This process comes with a number of risks, and only one or two missteps can lead to a sudden drop in the site's keyword rankings, and large loss of your organic traffic overnight. Now, we are going to have a brief discussion on some phases of Website Migration for you to make it more convenient.
Planning is essential for successful website migration:
Rushing is not a good way to proceed with a tricky thing like Website migration, and it also requires good planning and coordination among teams that may not always use the same technical language. To make sure you have every team member such as – system administrators, developers, designers, copywriters, project managers, SEOs all in the same page; you can go through a small test on a sub-directory or sub-domain.
You need to define the goals for the website migration, which will help you to determine whether the migration was successful when you go on to evaluate it post-migration. Never overlook the risks involved in your task and discuss the possible measures with your team. You need to prepare a list of what needs to be done before, during, and after the process. Also, assign the tasks to the right people.
Pre-migration Preparation phase & testing:
In this phase you need to take all the essential preparations for the upcoming work procedure, few basic things which need to be addressed are – URL structure, Meta information, Body content and headings, Hreflang, XML Sitemaps. Once you have decided to redesign your old site to a new one, make sure that the new one works faster, smoother, and in a more SEO-friendly way.
You can also try running a content inventory to create a full overview of your website’s content. Once you are done, make sure that you conduct pre-migration testing to ensure you are all set to hit the launch button on launch day.
Launching:
The event of launching also comes up with few important tasks like consider removing any limitations that you have put there to keep out search engines and update DNS records to direct them to the new environment.
Prioritise the Post-migration review process:
Even if you are done with launching there are still some task left to make sure everything is working smoothly in the new production environment. Otherwise, even if you have invested your best effort to make the whole thing perfect, you can still end up with a poor result.
Prepare a to-do checklist with tasks like – test your top-performing pages, verify your New robots.txt, check both meta robots and X-Robots-Tag. Also, check all redirects, go through the SEO checks, ensure all required analytics software is working properly.
Conclusion:
With such a massive task like website migration, you’re bound to face a number of issues, but following the phases properly, we will end up with ultimate success.
