Migration of websites can be a long and complex process that can last days or weeks to complete, so this event must be planned carefully ahead of time to prevent unexpected hiccups during the transition.
Once your web migration project plan is complete, metrics must be tracked post-migration to ensure your goals have been fulfilled.
Identify Your Goals
Website migrations can be complicated projects requiring many teams – from IT and SEO specialists through design specialists and designers – to work in unison towards meeting defined goals and assigning tasks for everyone involved to avoid costly errors. Creating milestones and assigning tasks will ensure everyone stays on the same page and can help prevent costly mistakes from being made along the way.
After defining your goals for migration, create a plan to meet them. It should include budget and timeline requirements and teams assigned for each task. Project management tools like Trello or Wrike may help organise this planning and keep an eye on all tasks that must be completed.
Before migrating your entire site over, you should conduct a pilot test of the migration. It will allow you to assess its effects on search visibility and traffic before switching over. A pilot will also help ensure that all new pages have been correctly indexed, identify key pages and compare their metadata against that found on existing websites to ensure everything has migrated correctly.
Create a Checklist
Website migrations can be time-consuming projects, requiring careful planning and assistance from professional consultants to be executed successfully. If the change is extensive or complex, additional assistance from professional consultants may be required to avoid missing crucial steps or making mistakes that compromise SEO performance and domain authority.
In this web migration project plan phase, businesses should involve as many stakeholders as possible in planning. It should include content, UX and analytics teams better to understand any challenges or opportunities in the migration process and figure out ROI calculations of each change that should be implemented during the migration process.
Start Crawling Your Site
Once you can initiate the site migration, perform a complete crawl using tools like Lumar or Screaming Frog. It will give you an accurate list of internal links that need updating and provide a historical benchmark against which to compare future metrics when the site launches live.
As part of website migration, there’s always the risk that some analytics tags may get erased; post-migration, you must ensure the relevant code is added to safeguard historical data.
Once your XML sitemap is ready, please submit it to Google Search Console and invite Google to recrawl the new implementation immediately. Doing this can ensure that once launched, the website is indexed properly – helping prevent temporary dips in traffic – and help search engines understand it now operates under different URLs. If canonical pages from the old implementation have been moved to their successor site, you should flag them to prevent duplicate content issues.
Create a 301 Redirect Plan
Three hundred one redirects are an essential component of the web migration project plan. Without them, your content could lose much of its search engine visibility as it moves to new pages – an enormous financial hit to any business.
A 301 redirect informs browsers that a page they are accessing has been permanently relocated, preventing current visitors from being directed to an empty holding page and helping maintain rankings.
Your 301 redirect plan should be created early and thoroughly, preferably well before your new website goes live. Google Webmaster Tools is useful in showing which pages are most linked to; this allows you to prioritise which ones to redirect traffic toward. The best way is to create an Excel spreadsheet list of URLs, including length calculations, so shorter URLs won’t get redirected before longer ones.
Test Your Site
Before beginning any website migration work, testing must take place. It allows you to identify and rectify any errors during migration, such as page load speed or organic search traffic comparisons against benchmarks. Furthermore, testing your XML site map and informing Google and Bing about your new domain using their Change of Address tool are great ways of checking for errors that might crop up.