Websites may need to do migrations to overcome some challenges, accepting new goals or other various reasons. But although it occurs once in a while, this is a procedure that many site owners and SEO professionals do not feel comfortable with.
Site owners usually want to know in advance how migration may impact their site by asking for information about potential traffic loss, or even revenue loss. SEO is needed to make sure that site migration follows the best practice to avoid common pitfalls in order to keep any losses to a minimum.
When a website is migrated, the website will have some other problems to overcome. To be able to solve all the new problems, before migrating, site owners should understand that their site migrated site will temporarily have traffic loss, ranking drops, further keywords strategy and new traffic maintenance
It's important to have enough time before doing any migration process, otherwise site owners may have to work day and night to recover those rankings that have plummeted. Therefore, it is important to make sure that the site owners understand the challenges and the risks.
Every site migration is different. Although previous migration was a success, there is no guarantee that the forthcoming one will also be successful. Search engines don't provide detailed step-by-step solution for this topic, therefore the best practice is best followed based on own or others' experiences.
You can migrate a site without having the site put offline by transferring all files with their respective databases before canceling the existing hosting plan, and run the website on the new place for a few days just to ensure that nothing was overlooked. But if downtime is a must or necessary, try to minimize the time.
Benchmark
Assumes that you have done all the project planning, timing, and already laid out the processes for your site migration, you should create a benchmark to know the pressure and expectations for the website to beat the old one.
There are several types of site migrations depending on what exactly changes, which usually falls under one or more of the following:
- Hosting/IP Address.
- Domain name.
- URL structure.
- Site architecture.
- Content.
- Design.
Benchmarking allows site owners and SEO professionals to see any legacy issues the previous incarnation of the site may have had, issues that may potential harm the new site. And by understanding any issues that may come in later times, the site owner can focus on how much time and cost will be spent.
Before doing anything, web developers needs to take the old site architecture, the new site architecture and the technical limitations of both platforms into consideration. Developers and site owners should also agree on the ideal time for the site to be migrated.
Development
This is process of the main migration will be established taking into account the main objectives, time constrains, effort, and available resources. Business objectives should be appropriately defined to precent any problems arise from the following. Therefore, a considerable amount of time and effort needs to be allocated in this stage.
- Measure rankings and performance.
- Block Crawlers' access.
- Crawl the old website.
- Prepare Robots.txt file.
- Export top pages.
- Export 404 pages.
- Check 301 redirects.
- Optimize redirects.
- URL redirect mapping.
- Fix broken links.
- Address duplicate contents.
- Prepare XML sitemap(s).
Launching the New Migrated Website
The website is successfully migrated and online. Depending on the authority, link equity and size of the site, Google and other search engines should start crawling the site quickly. However, do not expect the SERPs to be updated instantly. The new pages and URLs will be updated in the SERPs over a period of time, which typically can take from as early as a week to months.
- Notify Google via Webmaster Tools (migration).
- Manual checks.
- Monitor crawl errors.
Further Development
At this step, it's assumed that the there are no problems occurred on the previous step. When the site has no error internally, it's time to see how it performs externally and how links in the website pass link juice and visitors.
- Update most valuable backlinks: Direct links pass more value than 301 redirects. Try to contact the site webmasters where you have your backlinks to let them know about your site's migration.
- Build New Links: Generate new, fresh links to the homepage, category and sub-category page.
- Eliminate internal 301 redirects: Know the flow of link juice. And in order to detect internal 301 redirects, crawling the site would be handy.
- Measure Impact: The new website needs to be monitored for rankings and indexation on a weekly basis, but in general, no conclusions should be made earlier than 3-4 weeks.
Conclusion
Migrating a site takes resources. Make sure you have plenty of them before doing any attempt. Migration is a undefined phase in a website's lifecycle
After the migration process is done, continue the development effort to overcome the losses that may have occurred.