SEO Fundamentals of Website Migrations

Migrations of websites frequently cause anxiety. With so many moving parts, there's a chance that all of the SEO fundamentals you worked so hard to develop for your original website could be lost when you move it to a new server. Even so, there is no necessity for things to be in this state. To help you ensure that SEO fundamentals are maintained throughout the process, our SEO team has developed a website migration checklist. See more below.

What Is a Website Migration?

A website migration is when significant changes are made that have an impact on search engine visibility. There are many different kinds of migrations, and even more, reasons exist for you to consider moving.

Why is a site migration necessary?

There are numerous factors that would require you to migrate your website. Moving to a better server, for instance, could help you start over more successfully if you're rebranding or modernizing your website. Additionally, you may have the chance to enhance your SEO by updating your CMS, changing the structure of your website, or moving it to a secure HTTPS server.

Migration of an existing domain

The domain is kept the same during an existing domain migration, but it would benefit from a redesign, Content Management System (CMS) switch, or URL reorganization.

transfer to a new domain

New domain migration

A new domain Migration entails transferring your website to a different domain, which may entail switching to a different Top-Level Domain (TLD) or condensing multiple websites into one.

How Does Website Migration Effect SEO?

These are the risks you should be most aware of when migrating your website out of the many that exist.

• Loss of visibility

• Loss of traffic

• Loss of domain authority

You can reduce any risks to the SEO and website efforts you've worked so hard to maintain by putting SEO best practices at the forefront of your migration process.

You must exercise extra caution during three key phases of the site migration process, each of which is equally important. Here, we'll go over the factors you should take into account and the steps you should take during each of these phases.

Best practices before a site migration

Crawl your current site

To get a baseline list of all your URLs and an overview of how they are doing in terms of traffic, rankings, and backlinks, you must first perform a crawl of your site as it is currently configured. This will help you plan the next step and make sure you have a record of everything that is currently on your website.

Create a redirect map

By implementing 301 redirects on specific URLs, you can prevent users from encountering a missing-page 404 status code error and instead direct them to the most pertinent page on your new website. Additionally, it will make sure that your current website's link equity and authority are utilized.

Check your legacy and staging websites

Making a list of the URLs from your initial crawl is necessary to ensure that nothing is lost and that they can be accessed if necessary. This is a useful exercise for keeping an eye on any existing technical problems with the site, such as redirect chains, broken pages, or links leading to broken pages. If you take care of them before the migration, your new site will be technically sound and have a good User Experience (UX), which is a significant ranking factor.

It's crucial to crawl your staging site before starting the migration to make sure that there won't be many technical difficulties when the site goes live. It's crucial to map out your old URLs for your robot.txt and sitemaps.xml files while performing that crawl of the staging site. Your site's crawling budget will be reduced if certain pages are made impossible for user agents to crawl.

Likewise, the updated sitemaps with the new site's URLs must be included in the robot.txt files so that search engines can find, crawl, and index the pages. Failure to do so will result in indexation problems, which could prevent the site from showing up in organic search results and possibly result in revenue loss.

Best practices during a site migration

Crawl the new site

Migration to a new site ought to happen instantly if your site's Data Source Name (DSN) hasn't changed. If not, you might encounter a brief period of downtime. The best course of action is to crawl the new site as soon as it goes live to identify any potential problems that could harm performance.

Look for issues with indexability and crawlability

You should make sure that a updated.xml sitemap is referenced within the robots.txt file because indexability and crawlability may be related to potential issues with new site migrations. For Google to crawl the new site, you should then submit this in Google Search Console (GSC).

Recognize redirect chain problems

During site migrations, redirect chains are quite common and can harm the speed performance. A redirection chain resulting from migration, for instance, would require a page to be redirected from A to B to C, delaying the completion of the page's rendering for users. It is crucial to identify these problems as soon as possible because doing so leads to issues with speed and performance as well as a poor user experience.

The tracking analytics you use

To avoid data loss, it is crucial to configure GSC and Google Analytics (GA) for the new website. The GA annotation feature is especially useful for tracking the performance of your site both before and after the migration.

Best practices after a site migration

Performing a technical audit

It's crucial to perform a site audit as soon as the site has been migrated to ensure that everything has transferred over as expected. Common areas to look into include:

ensuring that pages were properly redirected

• Indexability

• Crawlability

• 404 Not Found

• Broken links

• Site speed

• Redirect chains

Monitor site performance

Even though it is typical to experience brief drops in traffic following a site migration, it is essential to keep a close eye on your analytics to make sure that there are no other significant problems impairing site performance. Any issues can cause less harm if you catch them early on.

The process of moving a website can be time-consuming and stressful, but it doesn't have to be. This procedure will go as smoothly as possible if you keep the fundamentals of SEO in mind.