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Did you know if you don’t migrate your website properly when you decide to rebuild your website there is the potential to lose all of your rankings? Let First Rank help with your website migration so you don’t lose the traffic you spent years building.
The Different Types Of Website Migration &
Their Challenges
- Protocol/Security Migration:
This type of migration involves moving your website from HTTP to HTTPS protocols. Risks include improperly implementing the HTTPS protocol, which can lead to Google warning users that your site is unsafe, and the complexities of sitewide URL changes.
- Server Migration:
Moving to a new host can help improve the speed of your website and allow you to host more content. The main risk from an SEO perspective involves losing files and data when you move your site to your new host.
- Top-Level Domain Migration
Changing your top-level domain (for example, from .ca to .com) carries many of the same risks as a domain-name migration; at times, a redirect may be more appropriate than a full migration.
- Structural Migration
Structural migrations involve changing the URLs and site structure of your existing site. This might include migrating some pages to a subdomain. All of these changes can force search engines to have to recrawl your website and can also lead to poor user experience if not implemented correctly.
- Hybrid Migration:
Hybrid migrations involve some mix of any or all of the migrations listed above. Hybrid migrations are incredibly complex, and we typically recommend performing each migration individually to simplify workflow and troubleshooting, as well as to minimize the effects of the migration on SEO.
- Domain Name Migration:
These are among the most difficult SEO migrations, as you’re moving every URL on your website. This means Google and other search engines will have to recrawl an entire new domain before you start to see rankings.
- Platform Migration:
Platform migrations involve moving from one content management system (CMS) like WordPress, to another (like Squarespace). Risks include losing content and the site not working properly with the new CMS.
- Website Merges:
Website merges involve taking two or more domains and merging them together. Challenges include accurately monitoring SEO changes on the newly merged site and ensuring that the new site is properly structured.
Our Site Migration Process
The migration process is complex; there are pitfalls everywhere. From relatively straightforward problems like broken links to understanding how the changes can affect your site’s performance, it pays to have a team of experts on your side to perform the migration for you.
At First Rank, we perform site migrations with search engine optimization and functionality as our top priorities. Our five-step process involves:
- Creating a detailed plan for your migration
- Preparing for the migration
- Creating a staging environment
- Launching your site
- Ongoing testing and optimization
1
Planning Your Website Migration
Every site migration begins in the planning phase. We do in-depth research to understand your users, your site’s architecture, your backlink profile, your content, and more. Our goal is to preserve functionality while maintaining and growing your rankings and site traffic in the post-migration environment. Here are some of the steps we take in the planning process:
- Create a communication strategy: We take the time to learn who your stakeholders are and what information they need to know. Everyone from your head of IT to your customers may need to know about the site migration. We evaluate who needs to know what information and create a strategy to keep stakeholders aware of changes.
- Collect data: In order to preserve and grow your rankings, we need to know how well your site is performing pre-migration. We use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a number of SEO tools to get a better understanding of your site’s performance.
- Set objectives: With the data we’ve collected, we’ll create benchmarks and set clear objectives, guiding the rest of the planning process. These benchmarks include site speed, functionality, layout shift, rankings, and more.
- Create a timeline: To migrate your website, we have to collect even more data to understand the pages on your site, their link profiles, their layout, and much more. We’ll then need to create a staging site, test the staging site, design a plan to redirect existing links to the new site, and more. During the planning phase, we create detailed timelines for all of these steps.
2
Preparing For The Site Migration
The techniques we’ll use to prepare for your site migration depend heavily on the type of migration being performed. Here are some of the steps we might take:
- Using SEO tools, we fully map your site structure, find broken links, unused or duplicate pages, and everything that will need to be moved.
- Purchase your new domain (if it hasn’t been purchased yet)
- Review best practices from your new host or CMS
- Run technical SEO audits
- Create a detailed 301 redirect strategy
- Create a sitemap to guide the site’s new structure
- Ensure that we have access to all of the content on your website so we can easily export it to the staging site
Once this work is completed, we can stage your new site.
3
Site Staging
Site staging is one of the most important parts of the website migration process; it enables us to test all of the changes to your site and slowly introduce Google and other search engines to the new environment without letting users onto the site—and without the staging site appearing in search results.
Here are some of the steps we take to set up and work in a staging environment:
- Block access to the staging site so that unwanted users and search engines can’t reach it
- Copy all of your existing site’s files to the staging site
- Update the content and links so that everything points to and from the right URLs
- Make any necessary layout changes
- Analyze the staging site with our SEO tools
- Give search engine crawlers access to the site once most of the work is done but forbid them from listing the site on search engines until it’s ready
- Map all old URLs to new URLs to prepare for redirects once the site launches
- Create appropriate URLs on the staging site, and delete unnecessary URLs on the legacy site
There are many other steps we might take; we have a comprehensive website migration checklist we use to ensure a successful migration between your existing site and the staging site once it’s launched. From knowing when to block search engines to creating a useful URL structure map, we do it all.
4
Launching The Site
All of the preparation we’ve done leads up to this: Launching your new site—the most important step of a successful site migration. We will take many steps to ensure the launch goes smoothly, including:
- Create a full backup of your old site and all of its files, data, and assets
- Migrate pages in chunks to make troubleshooting and data collection easier
- Test after each chunk is migrated
- Update your DNS
- Remove website blocks
- Enable all of our redirects from the old site
- Submit your new XML sitemap to Google
- Complete the change of address in Google Search Console
Your new site is now fully operational, but our work isn’t done; ongoing testing and optimizations are required.
5
Ongoing Testing & Optimization
Once your website migration is completed, we perform ongoing testing to ensure that your rankings don’t fall as a result of the migration. Some turbulence in your rankings is to be expected, but with our services, this turbulence will be minimized. From there, we’ll make efforts to grow your rankings beyond where they were before. Some steps we may take include:
- Testing for speed, usability, and keyword rankings, and comparing them to the benchmarks we set in the planning phase
- Checking for site issues using Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and our SEO tools
- Asking external sites with links to your old pages to link to your new pages instead, to minimize how often users are redirected
As an SEO agency, we offer a number of services that can extend beyond the website migration plan to improve your search engine rankings.
Why SEO Site Migration Services Matter
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Why Choose First Rank For Your Site Migration
We’re Industry Leaders With Years Of Site Migration Expertise
We’ve spent years perfecting our SEO and site migration strategies. We’ve migrated sites of all sizes, performing everything from simple protocol changes to complex hybrid migrations. No matter how complex your project is, we can help.
We’ll Keep You, Your Stakeholders, And Search Engines Happy
Site migrations are complex projects; it’s important to have clear, concise communication with stakeholders, customers, and even search engines themselves. Consider us the project managers of your digital demolition and reconstruction project; we’ll keep lines of communication open to help you understand what you need to communicate to the people the project can affect.
We Will Migrate Your Entire Site So You Can Focus On What Matters
SEO site migrations are what we’re good at. We take the pressure off of you, so you can focus on running your business and managing communication during the transition between one site and the next.
Planning a website migration? Contact the team at First Rank today. We offer free consultations; we’ll talk about your business, your goals in migrating your website, and what we can do for you. From there, we’ll perform a free SEO evaluation on your current site, and help you understand how our website migration services can help you maintain and grow your rankings when you move from one site to another.
Leave your website migration to the professionals. Contact us for a free consultation and site migration assessment today!
