The site migration has many challenges! During the task, there’s a chance many things might get overlooked or lost. Hence, it is essential to plan and implement the process accurately. If not, then the site migration process will lead to a disappointing experience. It will affect your organic traffic, visibility, and online review.
A failed site migration is never a desirable situation. The SEO agency or professional should address the task and resolve the issue at hand. It helps to retrieve the lost organic traffic and results in enhanced performance, in comparison to the pre-migration levels. Additionally, there’s increasing revenue and more conversions. It helps a company to improve its search marketing initiatives as well as SEO strategies. To know more about this, you can get in touch with Joel House Sydney.
It is essential to get the site migration process correct. For this, you need to maintain an SEO checklist. The following five factors are critical in the list.
- Analyse if migration is the best choice
Website migration leads to temporary web traffic loss. Google will need some time for processing all the changes and update the index correctly. When you execute a site migration carefully, it can bring down the traffic fluctuations. And at best, Google will start to treat this new site similar to an original site. The truth is site migration just by itself, doesn’t result in any excellent SEO advantage. It also doesn’t remove the search engine penalties. For this reason, site migration gets used for making SEO enhancements, for instance, a seamless website structure, consolidating the redundant pages, resolving the broken links, and making vital content enhancements.
Hence, it is essential to know when a site migration will work in your favour. It is good when:
- There’s a potent rebranding requirement
- You have to shift your site to HTTPS
- The movement will lead to links
- You should always use a sandbox
Don’t attempt a site migration before you’ve tested all that you need to in the test server. You should check whether the redirects are working well. After that, conduct all the essential checks that take place in private and then go public. If you try to execute the process at one go, there will be mistakes, which might affect your website.
- Choose to migrate when your year is slow
When you plan your site migration process correctly, it will not impact the web traffic. However, it’s essential to opt-in for a temporary dip. Hence, it is always a quick call to opt-in for website migration when the year is going slightly slow for you. When you conduct a site migration shortly or during the holiday, it will not fetch you the desired outcome. Your objective should be preventing website traffic loss. Else you will be losing out on valuable business opportunities.
- Ensure that your website crawls before site migration
You can use tools such as Screaming Frog and craw the site. Also, ensure that you save the site crawl later. You should possess an entire URL list of the earlier website, to ensure nothing gets lost during the transition process. Also, make use of this situation as a scope for recognizing any crawl mistakes. The mistakes might come up with time. Almost every website sometime or the other experiences redirect or broken links.
Furthermore, it is essential to replace or eliminate any links that point to the 404 pages at the time of site migration. You can keep on updating the links which lead to redirected pages so that it aims at the final page. No one wants to deal with redirect chains.
You should also know that site crawl can’t always recognize each single web page on the site. For instance, if your site includes pages that are associated with other site pages, they might not get crawled. You might want to use your records as well as databases for finding the web pages. When that doesn’t work, you can look for the web pages in Google Analytics data and also via a link explorer such as Aherfs and others.
Sometimes, you might also come across the orphan pages. If you do, make sure that the site gets updated, and you can link the same to various migration. Also, the websites are likely to increase the organic search engine traffic, when you don’t connect the same to other parts of the site.
- Create a standard with your analytics
It is essential to get a copy of the Google Analytics information. It is because you will require this data, for able to recognize when you underwent an organic website traffic loss after a website migration.
What to do when website traffic gets lots? You can export all the essential analytics information from the new website. Simultaneously, you can conduct a comparison concerning the website content in the web portal. It helps you to know about the pages that got lost in the traffic. On most situations, a website traffic case loss gets separated in the other pages, instead of the activities occurring in an entire site.
That is not all. You might also want to recognize and note all the highest-links that get linked to web pages, by using tools such as Aherfs. Once the migration process is over, you need to pay more attention to the web pages and also read the same very carefully. When you lose out on website traffic, it indicates that domain authority hasn’t been transferred effectively from an old to the brand-new site. The webpages provide you with maximum domain authority. Hence, any loss might impact the complete website performance negatively.
These are five essential aspects to consider before opting in for site migration. Once you get through with these five steps, you can also learn more on updating the internal links, resolving duplicate content problems, address any removed pages. There are various other factors to consider. It is challenging to execute the process yourself. It might lead to mistakes that you can talk about as well. An expert SEO agency helps you to conduct the process of site migration seamlessly. You need to select the best service provider to execute this process.