Moving a website can feel a lot like moving a house. It can be daunting, stressful, a lot of work and leave you worrying you’ve lost or left something behind. Just like moving house, sometimes you need help getting the job done properly or on time.
Site migration is the act of making major changes to a website. Most of the time, it involves moving a site from one CMS platform to another, but it can also mean changing domains or hosting providers or merging two or more sites into one.
All websites face challenges at times, especially as businesses grow. You may look into changing CMS because your current site can no longer handle the uptick in traffic or doesn’t let you use e-commerce to its full potential. A site migration can improve site performance and user experience, which can, in turn, boost your search engine rankings.
What’s the connection between site migration and SEO? Building search engine optimisation (SEO) into your strategy helps you preserve hard-won rankings, avoid traffic loss, hold onto your link equity, and improve the user experience. Not knowing how to do a site migration properly can result in data loss, unnecessary downtime, and backsliding on SEO progress.
If you’re looking for the best way to migrate your site while maintaining your SEO success, Anchor can help. As experts in web development and SEO, we’ve helped many sites like yours to change, grow and thrive. Here is our guide on how to do a site migration with SEO benefits included.
Preparing For Your Site Migration
Site migration with SEO always begins with serious planning. You’ll need to thoroughly prepare your site for migration before the next phase can begin. Steps include:
Define your goals
Document your website migration targets and the steps needed to achieve them. The more specific you can be and the more measurable your targets, the stronger the start you’re off to.
Conduct an SEO audit
Analyse your whole website, making an honest assessment of what works and what doesn’t. Focus on areas like SEO, levels of traffic and engagement metrics. After looking at the data, estimate the costs, risks, and proposed timelines for your project before moving on to the next phase.
Map out a project plan
Use the information you’ve collected to build a solid plan for your team. Break the migration into phases, set deadlines, map sequences of activities, and assign roles.
Hire professionals
Migrating your website to another platform is a mammoth task to do alone or even with a small team. Bringing other professionals on board, such as project managers, developers, and SEO and UX pros, helps the process run much smoother.
Use project management software
Using a centralised project management software program is key to making sure that every team member remains on the same page. You can use it to hand out information and updates to ensure your efforts remain coordinated.
Assess user experience
Just before you move your website, it's ideal to take an in-depth look at your user experience and make any necessary adjustments. Some important elements to consider are Google’s core web vitals and your site’s mobile-friendliness, accessibility, and security.
Sort out security
Keeping your data secure is a very high priority when moving to a new site. Make sure your current antivirus protection is up to date and consider additional measures to safeguard against threats and vulnerabilities during the transfer.
Migrating and Optimising the Site on a New CMS Platform
The decisions you make during the migrating process itself can make or break your site migration and SEO. Some tips on the best way to migrate your site include:
Group related content
Group your related content together in a logical fashion that makes it easy for both web users and search engines to find. Create a sitemap that simplifies the user experience and clarifies which content to keep and which content to discard. Group the sub-pages under the different navigational categories based on more general keywords.
Optimise content
When you’re spending this much time going over your existing content, it’s the perfect time to rework it to make it more engaging, user-friendly and SEO-friendly. Prioritise your highest-performing pages during the move. For the lower performers, assess whether they need to be scrapped, merged, rewritten, or 301 redirected. This is also the time to clean up duplicate and boilerplate content and merge multiple pages about the same topic.
Transport content
To transfer the content across, you can manually copy and paste, use a custom scripting approach or make use of importing and exporting tools, which are usually available on your new CMS system.
Manage links
Link equity is the value that a webpage gains from linking to another page, and it’s one of the easiest metrics to lose during your site migration. To maintain the SEO value that strong link building creates, make a spreadsheet that links every old URL to its corresponding new one. This will serve as your map for 301 redirects. Make sure you account for changes in site structure and URL names, and eliminate links that no longer serve your needs.
Back up your site
To ensure you don’t lose anything of value during the migration, back up your whole site including your XML sitemap, images and other precious resources.
Use a testing environment
Create a separate testing environment to experiment with changes before they go live. Make sure you block search engines from accessing this designated area.
Managing the Site Post-Launch
Congratulations! Your new website is up and running. But there are still steps you need to take in the days and weeks that follow to keep your SEO strategy strong:
Test site functionality
Conduct a thorough review of every link, feature and form on your website to make sure everything is working as intended. Pay close attention to important areas like e-commerce functionality, mobile responsiveness and site speed and address any issues as they occur. Google has tools that allow you to run tests and see what’s slowing down your site.
Watch your metrics
Use Google Analytics to monitor your site’s performance and traffic levels. While a temporary drop in activity after a site migration is normal, sharply plummeting organic traffic is cause for concern. Use your analytics tools to examine your behavioural metrics and see if users of your site are finding the solutions they seek.
Enhance the experience
Look for any weak points in the conversion funnel where users exit and see if you can improve calls to action, content layouts, visual elements, and more. When you’re confident that your new website is as strong as it can be, you can say goodbye to your old CMS and decommission it—the important final step in the process.
Migrate Your Website Easily With Anchor Digital
There’s a lot to remember when learning how to do a site migration with SEO included, so let Anchor make the task easier for you.
As a full-service creative marketing agency, web development is one of our specialties. With skills in both the creative side of development and the type of top-notch coding that goes on behind the scenes, we can carry out your site migration without losing any of your SEO capabilities. Search engine optimisation, another one of our services, is something we can maintain throughout the migration process and once your site is up and running on its new platform.
Our integrated, straightforward, common-sense approach means you won’t have to worry about losing any ground when migrating your site to a new platform. Our human-centric approach will allow you to continue your winning streak on a new site, capturing more conversions as you grow.
To become even better at what you do, contact the Anchor Digital team.
