Website migration is a major undertaking that involves moving, redesigning, or reconfiguring a website’s structure, content, or platform. Without careful planning and execution, it can severely impact your site’s search engine rankings and lead to a drop in precious organic traffic. However, with a comprehensive SEO migration checklist, you can avoid the typical pitfalls and maintain or even improve your SEO performance during the transition.
Below is a detailed SEO website migration checklist to help you navigate through every step of the site migration process.
Before beginning any website migration project, it’s critical to conduct thorough planning and an audit of your existing website. This phase allows you to understand your current site structure, assess SEO efforts, and create a strategy to ensure a successful migration without sacrificing search engine visibility.
Gathering data from your existing website is crucial to understanding its SEO performance before the site migration. Start by using tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to capture detailed insights. In Google Analytics, monitor essential metrics such as organic traffic, bounce rates, and conversions. This provides a baseline to assess the impact of the migration process on search engine visibility. Complement this with Bing Webmaster Tools to identify opportunities in other search engines as well.
Equally important, use SEMrush and Ahrefs to record your top-performing pages’ keyword rankings. This includes identifying key terms and saving the current rankings of each page as a benchmark. By doing so, you’ll have a reference to track and compare post-migration results. This approach allows you to monitor fluctuations and address potential drops in visibility, ensuring a successful website migration.
Not all pages on your current website contribute equally to your site’s success. Identify key pages with high traffic, conversions, or valuable external links, and map them out to create a clear 301 redirect strategy. This helps you retain link equity and prevent broken links, which could harm your search engine visibility.
Conducting a full technical SEO audit is vital. Use tools like Screaming Frog to detect broken links, missing meta tags, slow site speed, and other technical issues. Fixing these on your old site will prevent them from being carried over to the new website. Also, identify and fix structured data errors to ensure search engine crawlers understand your site’s context and relevance.
The staging site plays a crucial role in the site migration process. It allows your web development team to implement and test changes in a controlled environment, minimising risks before moving to the live site. This stage involves setting up the new site structure and preparing it for launch.
Establish a staging site that replicates your live site. This setup is essential for testing URL changes, internal links, and new features. To prevent indexing by search engines, include a noindex directive in your robots.txt file. This ensures your newly migrated site remains invisible to users and search engine crawlers until you’re ready to launch.
If you haven’t migrated to HTTPS yet, this is an opportune moment to make the switch. Use an SSL certificate and redirect all HTTP URLs to their HTTPS versions. Secure URLs not only build user trust, but are also a ranking factor in Google and other search engines.
Develop a clear URL structure for the new site, and test all new URLs alongside your 301 redirect plan. Redirects should be tested rigorously on the staging site to avoid linking errors or sending users to outdated pages. Avoid using 302 redirects, as they do not transfer link equity.
The pre-launch checklist is your final opportunity to verify that all elements of your site migration are functioning as expected. This phase includes reviewing on-page SEO, tracking setup, and preparing technical files for search engines.
Ensure all critical SEO elements like page titles, meta tags, internal links, and image alt texts are optimised for the new website. It’s essential to update internal links to reflect the new URL structure and fix any missing meta tags.
Implement and double-check your tracking tools, such as Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, across the newly migrated site. Missing or broken tracking codes could lead to lost data and hinder the analysis of the website migration process.
Generate an updated XML sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. The sitemap helps search engines discover and index your new pages quickly. Review and update your robots.txt file to guide search engine crawlers effectively.
After going live, it’s time to closely monitor the migrated site and address any issues that may have surfaced. The post-migration checklist focuses on validating your changes and ensuring the new site maintains or improves its SEO performance.
Once the new website is live, carefully track key metrics using Google Analytics. Look for sudden drops in traffic, broken internal links, or any changes in user behaviour. If any issues arise, resolve them promptly to prevent a decline in organic traffic.
Use Google Search Console to identify indexing errors or site crawl issues. Conduct a comprehensive crawl of the newly migrated site using tools like Screaming Frog to ensure all pages are being indexed correctly and all internal links are functional.
Testing the user experience is crucial post-migration. Verify that all critical conversion paths and CTAs are functioning properly across mobile devices and desktops. This step ensures that visitors have a seamless experience on the new site.
Post-migration, ongoing maintenance is vital to sustain and enhance your SEO performance. This phase emphasises regular technical audits, content updates, and adjustments to ensure your site remains competitive.
Regularly check your website architecture for broken or external links, slow-loading pages, and mobile responsiveness issues. Continuous monitoring using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights helps you identify and resolve any technical problems promptly.
Keep your content management system up-to-date and optimise the site’s content regularly. Refresh older content, update page URLs, refine titles and descriptions, and improve the site structure to keep the content relevant and engaging.
Post-migration, it’s essential to conduct a duplicate content audit. Use tools like SEMrush to find and fix duplicated content, which can harm your SEO efforts. This is also a good opportunity to assess if there are pages experiencing cannibalisation issues, where multiple pages compete for the same keywords. Implement canonical tags where needed to signal the preferred versions of your pages.
Migrating a website involves numerous steps and considerations, making it essential to follow a detailed website migration checklist. This process is not only about transferring content but also involves managing search engines, retaining search engine rankings, and safeguarding organic traffic. A successful site migration requires careful planning, thorough testing, and vigilant monitoring to ensure that your new site performs optimally.
However, because of the complexity and potential risks involved, it’s wise for agencies to consult with a white label SEO agency who has extensive experience in managing site migrations, especially if one of your clients is undergoing this process. An expert can guide you through the migration, help address technical challenges, and ensure the integrity of your clients’ SEO efforts. Contact us to minimise mistakes and maximise this opportunity to optimise site structures and enhance search engine visibility for your clients.