Moving Digital House: Your Website Migration Guide

Website migration – it’s one of the most daunting aspects of maintaining your online presence. Website migration can mean moving to a new host, moving to a newly designed site, moving to a new underlying platform, and more. No matter what, it’s always a stressful process. Our brief guide will help to streamline things for you.

Test First – Before you embark on a full migration, you need to conduct a small test using a subdomain or subdirectory of your main site. This allows you to check for breakdowns and issues that could cost time, money, and hassle.

Have a Plan – It is also important that you have an overarching plan that will guide your website migration process from beginning to end.

Have a Complete Redirect Map – In order to ensure that search engines realise you have changed your website, you need to tell them this. You do that by using a 301 redirect map. 301 redirects should go to specific URLs on your new site and should be based on existing keywords for each landing page.

Choose the Right Time – There are good times for a site migration and there are terrible times. Make sure you are migrating during the slowest time of year for your business. It would be a very bad thing for your website to be inaccessible during peak shopping season, for instance.

Change All Internal Links – Internal links are important for both consumers and search engine spiders. Make sure that you update all internal links to the new domain once your pages are in place, or they’ll end up broken and will have a negative impact on your success.

Check for Removed Pages – It’s important that you avoid removing pages during migration, but sometimes it is impossible to avoid this. If you do remove some pages, list out all removed pages, and remove links to those pages from others.

Ultimately, website migration does not have to be a headache. The right strategy will help.