Migrating your website can feel like a daunting and risky undertaking. The concerns people have are justified, as a website migration can have a major impact on your website’s performance and SEO. If executed poorly, it can result in devastating traffic loss.
Having said that, website migrations have been some of my most memorable and enjoyable projects. To me the process feels similar to solving a complex puzzle, especially the satisfaction of completing it successfully.
In this post, I share the most important SEO considerations for migrating a website.
What is a website migration?
There are some common types of website migrations:
- Merging two websites: for example when business A acquires business B and they want to retire business B’s website and merge it into business A’s existing website.
- Changing website domain: for example when you are rebranding to a different brand name and the website needs to be migrated from oldbrandname.com to newbrandname.com.
- Current website overhaul: when you are staying on the same domain, but you are making significant design changes to your website or switching to a different CMS.
Most of the time though, a custom solution is needed and it can be a combination of all 3 of the above. No migration project is the same.
Should I migrate my website in the first place?
Good question.
Looking at it purely from an SEO perspective and disregarding any other considerations, the answer would usually be no. Especially if you have good organic traffic as it is, you just don’t want to unnecessarily rock the boat.
However there are legit business decisions such as a rebrand or acquisition that warrant a website migration regardless of your current traffic levels.
What are the phases of a website migration?
A typical website migration project consists of a pre-migration phase and a post-migration phase.
In the pre-migration phase, you prepare the migration process which means outlining the steps to take and in what order. In the post-migration phase, you thoroughly audit the (new) website to ensure everything went according to plan.
The pre-migration phase
This is where you cover most of your SEO bases, and the process is going to look different based on what type of migration you are performing and your exact requirements.
If you are migrating to a brand new domain, make sure to have the new domain ready with a “Coming Soon” page. If you are using WordPress, there are many plugins for this that make it super easy.
The main reason is that this allows you to set up and verify Google Search Console for the new domain. Keep reading to find out why this is important.
If you are developing a new website in a staging or temporary environment, make sure to block indexing of the entire website via robots.txt and only disable this after completing the migration. You risk duplicate content and plagiarism issues with your old website if you don’t.
The most important part of the pre-migration phase is to gather a complete list of all of your existing website’s pages that need to be migrated. If you have a very large website or blog and you are not sure whether to migrate all of the pages, you should at least migrate those pages that are currently driving significant SEO traffic (or risk losing it).
The next step is to map each page to the most relevant page on the new website. The easiest version of this would be if you are migrating all the pages 1:1 to the new website with the same URL structure.
If you are merging two existing websites into one, the process changes and you need to carefully map each page from website A to the most topically relevant existing page on website B.
Most of the time though, there will be a hybrid of 1:1 page migrations, deleting pages and merging pages. The important part is that each individual page of your old website migrates somewhere.
Once you have mapped this out, make sure to save an offline copy of the complete list of your old website’s URLs (you are going to need this later to do your post-migration audit).
Last but not least: figure out how to implement 301 redirects from your old domain to the new domain (usually via your CMS backend or your hosting provider), and test out the process with some test pages.
Migration day
You could choose to migrate in phases, such as migrating your blog section or even individual articles first. However there will be a day when you pull the plug out of the old website and fully launch the new website.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to carefully consider which day you pick for the migration. In fact this goes for any major website change.
The main reason is that you can prepare all you want, but there are always going to be unforeseen issues. You want people on hand to carefully monitor the process and troubleshoot issues as they arise.
So repeat after me: “I shall not plan my website migration on a friday afternoon”.
And: “I will have my SEO resource and web development resource on standby when I migrate”.
Good!
Now it is time to implement the actual migration. This involves the following steps:
- Launch the new website with all the new pages
- Implement 301 redirects from the old website to the new website
- Deactivate the old website
The post-migration phase
Immediately after executing the migration, you should perform three Screaming Frog crawls in order to check the crawlability of your new website:
- A manual crawl of all the old URLs from your old website which you saved during the pre-migration phase. These should now all contain 301 redirects to the correct new URLs on your new website.
- From the first crawl result, grab the 301 redirect report from Screaming Frog to get the list of all the new URLs you are redirecting to. Run a new manual crawl on that list. If it returns all 200 status codes, that means all the new URLs you are redirecting your old URLs to are at least live and reachable.
- A standard crawl of the new website, which is another double check to see if none of the pages return 404 errors.
If all went well, these three steps should confirm that your new website is crawlable and that the pages are live and reachable.
The next step is to point your old domain to your new domain using Google Search Console. This way, you directly tell Google that your old domain no longer exists and that the content now sits under the new domain.
Although not strictly necessary, at this stage you could also request manual indexing in Google Search Console for a few of the new URLs. This gives another nudge to Google that they need to update their index.
Now you should keep a close eye on Google Search Console and the Google index for both the old website and the new website, and you should slowly see traffic coming in to the new website.
Do you need help migrating your website?
You now know the most important SEO considerations for a website migration project.
However as mentioned, no website migration is the same and it is important to have a detailed look at your unique situation.
Feel free to drop me a line if you would like a chat about this.
