What are the most important parts of a site migration?
It's absolutely vital that both users and search engines can find and index the new pages on your new website. We'll draw up a website migration checklist and tick off each step when it has been successfully completed, ensuring that nothing is missed.
This includes URL structures, 301 redirects, indexing, meta-data, sitemap submission, preserving your content, rank checking, indexation checks, and updating your Google Analytics goals.
How do you know if you achieved a successful website migration?
In most instances a successful site migration will show the following characteristics:
- No broken links following a site crawl.
- Minimal visibility loss from your old site to your new site during the first few weeks.
- Minimal long term rankings loss following the migration.
It is inevitable during a website migration that there will be some ranking volatility and impact on organic traffic in the short term, as the search engine drops the old content from its index and reindexes the new information.
The primary aim for a successful site migration is that this impact is not longstanding and the migration of old to new is as smooth as possible.
What are the risks of an unsuccessful domain migration?
It's essential that everyone involved in a website migration is aware of the risks involved, including the business owner, the SEO team and the front and back-end developers.
Failure to do so can result in a poorly executed site migration, leading to negative site performance, pages on your new domain not found by users or indexed by search engines, and organic traffic impacted significantly or not being successfully tracked in Google Analytics.
