Steps to Take Care Before Site Migration

Simple Steps that you must follow before your site Migration

Start Small to Test

The best thing to do is run a little test on a subdirectory or sub-domain to make sure you have everybody on the team on the same page. That way, if there are breakdowns in the chain of command or connection or communication failures, it will only damage a small part of the site.

Ensure the New Site is better than the Old One

If you are going through the process of moving the content from an old site to a new one, make sure the new one is faster, cleaner, and usually more SEO-friendly than the one you’re leaving behind. Otherwise, even if you do everything flawlessly, you might still end up underperforming. Basically, don’t do unnecessary work for yourself.

Arrange the Tracking before Migrating a Website

Before touching anything on your old website, ensure that you have the metrics to trail your migration movement before, during, and afterward. All you need to do is list the target domain as a competitor and build a dashboard that compares rankings, organic search traffic, backlinks, and indexed pages to the previous domain.

Create a Thorough 301 Redirect Map

This is the most essential step of your migration process because you need to notify the search engines that you’ve moved your site to a new home, and they need clear instructions to change the address. Otherwise, all the links you have made over the years will vanish, and all of those profitable keyword rankings will disappear too.

You will use this document to apply 301 permanent redirects to all old pages so that they send both users and search engine bots alike to the new and improved version of the page. Notice: Your technical team may want to try temporary 302 redirects as those are often easier to implement. A 301 redirect will basically assure that all the keywords your old pages rank for will swap out the old landing page with the new one. Setting the URLs this way also guarantees that you won’t unintentionally leave pages out and show 404 "Not found" errors on them. They should redirect all 301s to a specific URL on the new one. Otherwise, you won’t retain your old arrangements.

Don’t Shilly-shally on the Final Execution

You've run the test, you’ve got your monitoring tools and dashboards, and your teams are up, and you’ve been telling everyone for months how great your new site is. Here’s what you have to do: 

Based on your mapping document, apply the 301 redirects

Keep posted all of the rel=canonical tags on your sites 

Update all of the internal links on your sites 

Reach to anyone still linking to the old URL and request them to update their links.

Bring up-to-date your XML sitemap, and yield to it to Google Search Console 

Don’t Forget Quality Control and Performance Monitoring

The new site has been published, and the site migration is over, but you are not out of the clear just yet. We've seen migrations go well, only to have traffic nose dive a month later because Google noticed some redirect loops in the internal link structure. Make sure to check all of those internal links and 301 redirects. Congratulations, you have effectively completed a site migration, now you can publish wonderful content on your new site and promote your brand.