Tips to Migrate Your Website Without Losing SEO Benefits?

As a business website grows, the migration become inevitable. It is a key stage in the website’s growth journey, so you should not look to avoid that. Unfortunately, a lot of companies get the migration wrong and end up paying with SEO benefits and search engine rankings. If some fail to prepare well for the migration, then others botch up the processes itself to pay a hefty price.

The worse it, a bad migration might set you back some six months of recovery with traffic, which is something no business would ever like to face. That kind of recovery process might harm the prospects of both the website and business. However, only a small loss of traffic may happen and that too temporarily when the migration is done in a proper manner and by following due process.

Before going ahead with website migration, it’s always better to know what it is all about –

✓ With platform migration, you will change the website from one CMS (content management system) to another, which involves different coding and SEO options, and may also affect how search engines crawl the pages

✓ With website redesign, you plan to change the layout of the site and also the way the content is displayed, which eventually can affect crawling of the site by search engines

✓ Domain name change is also a form of website migration where you may decide to move the site from one domain type to another

✓ In some cases, a business might decide to go for web host change in order to get better services where new servers will host the site, which can alter the IP address of the business

✓ Protocol change is also one of types of website migration where you may either switch from HTTP to HTTPs to add protocols (HTTP or HTTPS) to enhance the security of the site

Issues with Website Migration That Can Hurt SEO

Although a website migration is intended to improve the overall traffic, it might do the opposite if not done properly. A lot of harm can befall the site if migration goes wrong. So, being careful can serve the cause and save the harm.

Here are some of issues that can hurt SEO badly –

✓ Before starting the migration process, it’s key to properly index all of the content and images and then make sure that they migrate properly

✓ Bad SEO, broken redirects and delicacy of content can negatively affect the site content when migrated

✓ New content must also be optimized to boost their visibility in search engine result pages

✓ Avoid common website errors like the dubious 404 error while migrating else it can cost a lot of traffic

✓ Before migration, check if all web pages are fine and working well so that no harm is done to SEO

✓ Domain errors are quite common when domain name of host provider is changed but you should look to avoid them to not let the SEO suffer

Tips for Website Migration

Planning is key to make a website migration go smooth. You also need to look at a few things which can help make the process easier.

Here are some of tips for website migration –

✓ A website migration can be both beneficial and harmful depending on how successfully you did it, so it’s always better to weigh in on the plusses and minuses before moving ahead with the process

✓ A migration becomes essential in cases where your site is not running on HTTPS or where the web host gives problems, but it is not advisable where the site is experiencing steady traffic and performing optimally

✓ It’s important to have a website migration strategy in place so that the processes become clear when you look to redesign or change web host or change website protocol

✓ You should have strategy in place whether you take migration to boost the traffic or get better security or better hosting services

✓ A website migration does not always involve moving everything, so you can audit the content and web pages with the aim to dump the needless one and revamp the content for new site

✓ Never look to delete all of web pages at once or simultaneously as it might harm the search rankings and rather look to delete or change what will be good for the site

✓ You can check rankings of different pages with the purpose to either remove them systematically or repurpose the pages that neither help provide information nor help gain traffic

✓ Make sure you set the 301 redirects so that someone clicking on the old links are sent to the new web pages

✓ Knowing the analytics and traffic can help a lot with the migration process as this will help plan accordingly in terms of pages, keywords, links to remove or retain

✓ The knowledge of site’s performance or analytics can give the idea about the best time for migration where you could avoid loss to the traffic

✓ Have a proper and full back of the website so that you can have everything safe for reference if the migration fails

✓ Be careful with the site navigation and also create a site map that considers use experience and convenience

✓ It’s must to crawl the old site before the migration so that you have everything saved to handle the failure

✓ Make sure you have also saved the XML sitemaps and robot.txt files as they can help a lot when you configure the new site

✓ Update the new robots.txt file with the new XML sitemaps, and always look to create two different XML sitemaps where the one will inform the search engine about redirects with migration while the other will have all the indexable pages

✓ You can now migrate the website and make sure you monitor the site to find if everything is smooth, check the Search Console for crawling information

✓ You can do regular tests to check whether the site is performing optimally, and if not, you can benefit from web development India as experts can always make the migration a totally hassle-free process