7 Necessary Steps Before Site Migration
Here are seven steps you must follow before migrating your site.
1. Start the test
Your best bet is to run a small test on a subdirectory or subdomain to make sure all team members are on the same page. That way, if there is a cascade of drive failures or connection failures, only a small fraction of the sites will be damaged.
2. Make sure the new site is better than the old one
If you’re going through the process of moving content from an old site to a new one, make sure the new site is faster, cleaner, and generally more SEO-friendly than the one you left behind. Otherwise, even if you do everything perfectly, you may end up performing poorly. Don’t do unnecessary work yourself.
3. Set up tracking before migrating your site
Before touching anything on the old site, make sure you have metrics to track progress before, during, and after the migration. All you have to do is list your target domain as a competitor and create a dashboard comparing rankings, indexed pages, backlinks and organic search traffic with the previous domain.
4. Create a complete 301 redirect mapping
This is the most important step in the migration process, and I’ll tell you why – 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’ve earned over the years and all the profitable keyword rankings you’ve earned will be gone.get all addresses url from your location; set it as address url Do your best to adapt to the new site.Each address must be set url to speak url New, relevant during the migration process based on the content of these pages. Put it into a spreadsheet.
You’ll use this document to apply a permanent 301 redirect to all legacy pages, directing users and search engine bots to the new, improved version of the page. Warning: Your technical team may want to try temporary 302 redirects, as they are usually easier to implement. Don’t let them down! A 302 redirect tells search engines that you want to keep all the ratings and links from the old page, and that you only want to send traffic to the new page for a short period of time. This is important during migration. A 301 redirect will ensure that all keywords the old page ranks for will replace the old landing page with the new one.Make sure to assign the address url This also doesn’t leave the page with a 404 “Not Found” error on the page. At the end of the site migration, none of the previous pages on the site should be 404, 302 or 5XX.They should forward all 301’s to one address url specified in the new address. Otherwise, you won’t be able to keep the old arrangement and have to start from scratch in the new area.
5. Start promoting your new website
The hard part of migrating a site is letting the internet know that you’ve moved there.People have linked, bookmarked and shared your old site Facebook and discuss it with their friends, but you have to get them to stop talking about the address url Old ones, start talking about new addresses. This is where PR and social media teams play an important role before, during and after deportation.
They need help promoting their website’s impending move. They should contact anyone linking to the above site and advise them that their link may need to be updated. Don’t get me wrong, links technically still work when 301 redirects are applied, but they lose some impact and cause some confusion for visitors using those links.
The best relay race we’ve ever seen starts with a pre-launch roadshow. They created a “coming soon” landing page on the new domain while working on technical issues in the background, and worked to promote the new site to the press, their business partners, and any other fans of the old content. Doing this helps them retain as much momentum as possible and start building enthusiasm for moving the site. Early on, so when they finally flipped the switch, that led to a jump in the ranks.
6. Not taking it seriously
You’ve done testing, you’ve got monitoring tools and dashboards set up, your team is up and running, and you’ve been telling everyone how awesome your new website is for months. Now is the time to get the job done. The worst thing you can do is start your new website slowly. We’ve seen in case studies that it’s ideal to do the switchover as quickly as possible and complete the migration within a day or two.
Give it a little more time and the search engines will start to get confused and start giving you a bunch of gibberish addresses url in its index. Slow down and don’t miss out on a lot of organic search traffic. Move this site quickly and move it right. Here’s what to do:
Apply 301 redirects according to your mapping documentation.
Update all rel=canonical tags pointing to addresses on your site url new.
Update all internal links on your site to point to the URL url new.
Contact anyone who still has the address link url Older (at least influential ones) and ask them to update their links.
Update and submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Do all of these things as quickly as possible so that search engines can quickly adjust and start indexing new URLs. After completing all five of these steps, you should start seeing your new website’s landing pages replacing your old landing pages in the SERPs within a week or two, depending on how often search engines crawl your page.
7. Don’t forget about quality control and performance control.
Your new site is live and your website migration is complete, but you haven’t exceeded your expectations yet. We’ve seen the migration go well, but after a month traffic drops off as Google notices some redirect loops in the internal linking structure. Don’t be surprised. Make sure to create a baseline for indexed pages and monitor backlinks, keyword rankings, and organic search traffic to the old site for at least 6 months.
Ideally, you should see all of these numbers gradually drop to 0 at the old position and equalize as they rise at the new position. Be sure to check all these internal links and 301 redirects, and watch the console check for server errors or bad indexing threads.
