You’ll eventually feel to incorporate major changes to your website due to various reasons. That’s when website migration will help you make the massive updates. It’s an umbrella term to involves almost all features of a functional website.
The process is incredibly complex but worth the trouble if implemented properly. Many technical as well as SEO factors directly take part in the lengthy yet necessary action. And you must comply with the following checklist for success.
· Choose a Migration Strategy
Careful planning is the foremost step to devising a workable migration for your website. The strategy involves several pre-migration actions, such as –
- Setting Objectives: Define the ultimate goals you want to accomplish upon its completion.
- Knowing Migration: Familiarize yourself with the entire process for proper implementation.
- Getting SEO Data: Gather crucial SEO insights from free and/or premium analytical tools.
- Assembling Team: Inform and assign professionals to employ the project with SEO experts.
Map out the entire task by specs, goals, and resources. The more time you’ll spend on initial planning, the chances of negative SEO impact will subside.
Involve key stakeholders ASAP to retain their purchases on upcoming changes. It’ll allow everyone to highlight potential concerns at the right time.
· Set a Timeline
Choosing a strategic, realistic, convenient timeframe is crucial to exert the least effect on users. The content will remain indirectly unavailable for some time. Expect a 10% – 20% drop in the organic traffic.
Schedule the migration when the traffic hits the lowest point. You’ll have to take all the off-peak hours, weekends, slow seasons. However, the suitability depends on your intended customers’ locations.
Working early in the morning or late at night seems good for websites to serve local audiences. But sites with many international viewers may find it difficult to settle down on a reasonably well-suited time.
Think of the timeframe in months – not hours, days, weeks. Even a small to medium-sized site requires about 3 to 6 months. A small site features around 20 webpages whereas a large one contains 100+.
· Create a Staging Site
Making a duplicate version of your website accessible to users can let you test all the planned changes. However, the staging site only remains visible and/or accessible to your teams.
It gives all the involved teams ample space and time to lay out the changes and understand the effects. It’s particularly helpful in addressing the update requirements for sitemaps and URLs.
Create a fresh, updated, and functional copy of your actual website as a stored backup. If anything goes wrong in migration, you can instantly restore your website to its original stale.
· Migrate Your Content
It’s time to push the migrated website live while keeping tabs on some important technical aspects. Migration actually starts from the point when you start working on the website, including –
- Set up a new hosting account to get extra time right before the migration. Preparing your hosting credentials lets you dig into details for potential issues.
- Disable all the active redirect plugins, firewalls, and caching plugins. Otherwise, different types of errors will keep popping up during the site’s migration.
- Keep a content inventory of every content, page, doc, media, and other assets. it can help you address concerns over lost or inaccessible resources.
- Using a site migration plugin can ease the entire task of moving files and data. You can also go for manual migration to suit the advanced user demand.
- Manual migration needs login to your hosting account to access the File Manager. Employing FTP is also available to reach out to your data and files.
- Place canonical links with tag signals to Google for original webpages. It’s because migration can create multiple webpage versions, even temporarily.
· Set Up 301 Redirects
Keeping the website links the same before and after the process is a must to retain your SEO. Migrating the website can alter or change your webpages within the structure. It directly results in broken URLs and even distorted internal links.
A 301 redirect is essential to avoid broken internal links leading to dead ends. It’s a technical approach to let the search engine redirect users to the new webpages. The file type required to create a 301 redirect involves CMS and development.
· Update Your DNS Records
Pointing the domain name to your new hosting account is the next step to complete the migration. DNS (Domain Name System) records establish a connection to the domain name with the hosting server.
It also includes the nameservers to enable smooth access. A web host with free migration performs the task automatically. But a manual migration will need your domain credentials to update the setting.
· Test Your Website Thoroughly
Migrating your online assets to a new address is now complete. However, it doesn’t end right there. You’re now obliged to conduct tests to assess long-term and short-term concerns.
The immediate actions you need to implement are –
- Updating robots.txt files for accessibility
- Reviewing website’s entire SEO structure
- Checking the HTML tags for web analytics
- Submitting a well-prepared XML sitemap
- Analyzing all the key or major webpages
It’s more like evaluating the newly gone live website to confirm whether everything is in place or not. You shouldn’t close your old website version right away without looking into these facts.
· Monitor Your Website Performance
Conducting a full-scale SEO analysis can provide detailed insight into the essential and even secondary metrics. You must emphasize the following SEO concerns –
- Page Load Speed
- Keyword Ranking
- Indexing Rate
- Metadata
- Page Crawlability
- Server Response
The performance checks should further include UX/UI, downloads, forms, navigation, etc. It’s indeed the long-term understanding of whether the changes keep up the expectations.
· Fix Any Issues
A detailed analysis is likely to detect and notify potential fixes. Or, you can simply employ an SEO audit to know where you need to make improvements, immediate or not. Errors and/or downgrades for certain segments can happen during migration. And you must address the issues to retain ranking and traffic.
Wrapping Up
Turning your website into a more attractive, user-friendly, informative online depot is the ultimate goal. Site migration project requires massive undertakings with the involvement of almost every related team. But the ultimate checklist of website migration should provide a reasonable understanding of how to enable easy planning, implementation, monitoring.
Contact Tectera a website development company for website migration services.
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