There are several reasons to migrate your website. They might be to enhance website security through another hosting provider, update your brand image, or improve your user experience.
Whatever the reason, you’ll need to follow a migration process that allows you to update your site without compromising your SEO rankings, traffic, and revenue.
Many SEO professionals face a common fear when it comes to website migration: the loss of valuable traffic, rankings, and users during the transition.
A migration strategy prevents data loss, performance dips, and downtime when you move your site to a new domain, hosting platform, or CMS.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through the 16 best practices for a successful website migration.
The Website Migration Process: A 16-Step Checklist
I’ll break down all the tasks into three phases: planning, pre-migration, and post-migration phase.
Phase 1: Planning
As with any multi-dimensional project, your website migration needs thorough planning. Complete these steps before you begin development:
1. Define Project Scope
First, take inventory of all your webpages. What are you trying to achieve with the migration, and how much of the site will it affect?
Your website migration is set to fail if you don’t have a well-defined goal and scope.
2. Set Migration Team And Responsibilities
Who will lead the project? The in-house SEO team or an outsourced SEO agency?
If you’re managing the project internally, be sure to set up a project management framework so everyone can keep tabs on tasks that belong to them.
3. Manage Cross-Department And Stakeholder Expectations
Which other departments will the project impact? Identify all stakeholders involved in the migration process.
Alongside the SEO and dev teams, this often includes designers, IT staff, quality assurance testers, content managers, product designers, and marketers.
It all depends on what your company is and how many department needs to be involved in an activity like website migration.
You can schedule a meeting to explain why you need it and what you aim to achieve. This is also an excellent opportunity to gather feedback on their specific needs, which could help you choose a better domain (or CMS) that serves your future needs.
Tip: Be transparent about the migration process and what they should expect in terms of functionality, design, and performance.
4. Define Your Timelines And Launch Date
Ideally, your new site should go live when site traffic is at its lowest, and your team has the capacity to respond to any unforeseen hiccups.
Choose a day that has the least impact on your business. This can be during off-hours or when you have little to no low business activity.
You can also do it batch by batch rather than migrate all your pages at once.
Phase 2: Pre-Migration Stage
This is an extension of the planning stage. It’s where you set the foundation for a smooth transition and minimize during or post-migration risks.
5. Run A Detailed Risk Assessment
Audit your webpages to spot potential issues before, during, and after migration. This could be traffic loss, disrupted user flow, broken links, or other technical SEO issues.
Rank these risks by their impact on your business using a simple low-medium-high scale, then tackle the most critical first.
Then, create an effective mitigation plan to minimize the severity of the risks. Some effective techniques are:
Backup all content, meta-data, and configurations before migration.
Use a risk assessment matrix to measure the risks involved in the website migration process and its impact on your business goals.
Use a staging environment to test changes before it goes live.
Implement 301 redirects for all the changed URLs to maintain their SEO value.
6. Define Performance Benchmarks And Set Up Tracking
Build a detailed picture of your site’s existing performance so you have something to compare your new site with.
At this stage, it’s a good idea to back up your existing site in case you need to restore it during the migration process. You’ll want to pull benchmark data for the following:
Core Web Vitals: Use Google’s PageSpeedInsights to measure metrics like loading speed, user interactivity, and visual stability.
Server Response Time: Tools like GTMetrix let you see vitals such as the time to first byte (TTFB) and the overall performance of your website server.
Database Performance Metrics: Analyze database performance to ensure that it can handle the expected traffic loads post-migration. This may require reviewing query execution times, indexing, etc.
Usability Testing: Manually check out all the key areas (conversion elements) to ensure they’re working effectively. You can run A/B tests to identify conversion-deficient areas or pain points that need to be addressed in the new design.
Overall Website Performance: Use Google Analytics, Search Console, or third-party tools like Ahrefs to evaluate your current organic traffic, rankings, indexed pages, crawl errors, indexing rate, and backlinks.
In addition to benchmarking, this is a good time to double-check that you’re tracking all your target keywords in your rank-tracking tool.
This is (very) important as it helps you know how much traffic/rankings you lost/gained after the migration.
7. Ensure Dev and SEO Are Aligned On Performance
If your migration involves a technical overhaul (a CMS change, server migration, or redesign), let your developers know the SEO performance metrics that are important to you. This helps minimize the migration’s impact on your SEO performance.
These migrations might require a complete mapping of old URLs to new ones – give these details to your developers, as missing redirects will tank your rankings and affect organic traffic.
Other issues to look out for are:
Ideally, review your entire SEO performance before and after the migration is complete so that you can compare results.
8. Document Everything
Document all your active server settings and configurations before you migrate your website. This includes the details about the DNS settings, CDN configurations, and hosting environment.
Server documentation has several benefits:
It ensures the new server environment mirrors the old one and reduces the risks of inconsistencies that may cause performance issues.
If any problems arise post-migration, detailed server documentation makes it easier for relevant teams to find, diagnose, and resolve them.
It acts as a comprehensive reference for future migrations or server updates.
Configuration management tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Terraform are popular tools for documenting server configurations in a reusable, readable, and version-controlled format.
Version control tools like Git can also be used to track changes made and collaborate effectively with teams during the migration.
9. Set Up A Testing Environment
It’s best to develop your site in a closed testing environment on a separate server to verify the new site functions properly before launching. This is called a staging website.
It is a clone of your website where you can try out all functionalities – themes, calls to action, plugins, etc. – without disrupting operations on the live website.
A staging website also allows you to identify and fix any potential issues or conflicts before the migration process.
Of course, you’ll need to block public access to the testing environment and prevent search engines from indexing your new pages too soon.
You can either create a robot.txt file to block search engines like Google, add the noindex tag to your new URLs, or set up password protection (.htpasswd).
It looks like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>
Once you have this all set up, run a technical SEO audit on the staging site to find and fix issues before migrating to your live site.
Watch out for little foxes like broken site links, missing alt-texts, meta titles, duplicate URLs, etc., and fix them before migrating to your live website.
Third-party SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Screaming Frog can help you achieve this.
Tip: Ensure you have a recent backup of your website after the clone. This way, you have a version to revert to if needed.
10. Conduct A Content Inventory
Now, it’s time to build a complete overview of your existing content and pages.
A content inventory lets you identify if anything goes missing during the migration. Moreover, creating a list of URLs will draw your attention to any existing bugs (like broken links or bad redirects) for you to address before the migration.
You can use a combination of methods to create a comprehensive list of your pages and content assets, such as:
Pulling all your URLs with a site crawler.
Downloading page data from your CMS.
Exporting URLs from Google Search Console.
Don’t forget that site crawlers don’t always pick up orphan pages in a standard crawl if they are not linked internally.