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We get it. Once you’ve got a website redesign or rebrand on the cards, it’s really tempting to dive straight in and make all the changes you want as soon as possible. But before you embrace the ‘out with the old’ concept too enthusiastically, it’s important to understand which changes carry more risk for your SEO and how you can manage these carefully.
Changes to your URLs, website design, the platform the site is built on or where it’s hosted come under the banner of a website migration – and this can include changes that you may think are quite small!
Migrations can include changes like:
- Updating from http to https. Most sites have already gone through this process by now, but it highlights how a seemingly small change still constitutes an SEO migration. Changing one letter in the URL? That ‘s’ does a whole lot more than that, and you need a plan in place for the process.
- Changing your domain(s) for a rebrand. If a rebrand includes altering or changing your business name, you might decide that you want a new URL to match the new brand. This also applies to multiple websites which are combining as part of a business merger or acquisition.
- Moving to a new server or web host. Changing your web host or server might be necessary to speed up a growing website or provide additional features – but this includes moving all of your website files, which is a significant process.
- Switching your CMS (Content Management System) The CMS is the platform your website is built on. Common CMS include WordPress, SquareSpace, Magento and Shopify, but there are loads of options out there. Again, this means moving all your content and rebuilding the site on a different platform.
Effectively, any major change that impacts your SEO and online visibility can be considered as a migration. While a migration is usually for positive reasons – e.g. improving branding, user experience, site speed etc – there are risks to be aware of, and the process needs to be planned for and managed carefully.
What are the risks of a website migration?
SEO is a sensitive beast, and any changes to a website can cause an increase or decrease in search engine visibility – that’s why there are always so many moving parts in SEO, rather than a quick ‘one size fits all’ product.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see why making a lot of changes at once can come with plenty of risk. A migration generally comes with a whole bunch of changes, which could include changes to URLs, website code, site architecture and more. Even the ‘simple’ http to https migration mentioned above means changing every single URL on the website, along with all the internal linking to other pages, files, images and more – all at once.
We can’t avoid migrations – if we did, the internet would still look like it did back in the 90s! They’re an essential part of online marketing, but there needs to be a clear process for managing the different stages of the migration.
If done badly (or not managed at all), the long-term risks of a migration can include:
- Losing traffic
- Losing website authority
- Creating a negative search experience as people hit 404 (not found) error pages from search engine results
- Breaking the website
- Losing parts of the website or data
- Affecting how the website is crawled, giving a longer term negative impact on ranking
It should be noted that in the early weeks after a migration, there will be a period of reduced search engine visibility. This is usually a volatile period while search engines are recrawling the website to work out what’s changed, so you’ll often find that search performance bounces around for the first month or two, before steadying out. This in itself isn’t a bad migration – it’s just part of the process – but it’s worth keeping the timing in mind if your website heavily relies on search traffic and has peak trading seasons.
It can be possible to recover from a bad migration, but this isn’t always the case – so it’s always better to plan for the process.
So, how can we plan? Here are a few key areas:
1. Engage with an SEO consultant early on
When it comes to SEO migrations, prevention is 100% better than cure! Whether your website is primarily there to create brand awareness, or it’s a key part of generating millions of pounds of revenue – if it’s important to your business functioning, then engaging the services of an SEO consultant or agency early on is essential.
While you could do a migration by yourself, there’s a lot that could go wrong in the process – and it can be harder (and therefore more expensive) to fix after it’s gone wrong. And as we mentioned above, sometimes sites don’t fully recover – so if you’re not confident in how to manage the process, hire someone who is.
2. Benchmark the current website performance
Part of the pre-migration process is to audit the site and create a benchmark of how the current site is performing, so that you’ve got something to judge future performance against. This can include metrics such as traffic, acquisition sources, engagement on the site, keyword rankings, site speed and more, depending on your priorities and the KPIs you use in your business. If you’re looking to consolidate content, the audit can also help flag up key pages for acquisition or backlinks which should be kept.
3. Set your end goals
What are your goals and expectations for the project? Do you want to see traffic return to your baseline levels (and higher) – or have you pivoted the business and need to reach an audience for new keywords? Your eventual goals will help to provide a guide for decisions throughout the migration process.
4. Change one thing at once – if you can
When you’re looking to make big SEO gains, this seems counterintuitive! But if at all possible for your situation, it’s less risky to make changes in stages rather than all at once. For a major rebrand and redesign, this might mean changing the CMS and design, but keeping the current domain and content at first; then switching the domain at the next stage; and then making the significant content changes as a third stage.
The reason for this is that there are so many moving parts that changing too much at once can make it really difficult to correlate a decline in visibility with the change that caused it. This in turn makes it difficult to reverse that change, in order to find a solution which doesn’t cause as many issues for your site.
Running a migration in stages isn’t possible for all businesses – it generally requires more resource as it’s a longer process, and each individual step carries risk and needs planning. A longer migration process might not work for your budget or timeline, but if it could be a possibility for your business, it’s definitely worth consideration.
5. Backup, backup, backup, backup, backup….
This one shouldn’t need too much explanation. Stuff might break. Backups are essential! It’s also important to note that the backup should be kept separately from your website – don’t just run a backup on your hosting service and leave it there.
6. Copy ALL the content
This step applies if you have a migration which means moving your content to a new website – such as a redesign or CMS platform change. When you’re copying content over, the obvious bit of content is the big chunk of text that you can see on a page – but there are also less visible content elements that should be copied over in order to keep as much as possible the same (see #4 above…)
Elements to keep in mind include:
- Meta titles and descriptions
- Social sharing meta tags, such as open graph tags or twitter cards
- Image file names and alt tags
- URL slugs (the end of the URL after your domain name)
- Any schema code
- Maintaining the same title tag elements (h1, h2 etc)
- Keep the same content format – e.g. bullet points, lists
7. Create a redirect map
One of the things that commonly goes wrong with an SEO migration is that there’s nothing in place telling search engines where to send people if they land on an old URL.
A redirect is a piece of code which automatically sends browsers from an old URL to the best URL on the new website. Without this in place, you’ll hit a couple of issues:
- Initially the old URLs will still be indexed by Google, so when people click to visit your site from search results they’ll see a 404 error page.
- Google will realise that lots of your URLs are broken, which is a big negative for your SEO.
- The internal links on your website will be broken, which ruins the user experience and leads to higher rates of visitor drop-offs.
- Any backlinks pointing to those old URLs will also become a broken link, which means you lose the benefits of those valuable backlinks.
A redirect map lays out all of your current URLs, and then shows the new URL that each will point towards. It’s best practice to redirect a user to the most relevant content – whether that’s the same content on a new URL, or a closely related page.
This process is often time consuming, but resist the temptation to speed it up by redirecting everything to your home page! Search engines don’t see this as a relevant redirect, so this often leads to lower ranking positions and less traffic.
Your redirect map can be implemented via your htaccess file, or through a section of your CMS, depending on your website set up.
8.Have your team on call on the day
There’s a huge amount of planning and testing which goes into the preparation for a migration and a new website build. Even with the best of care taken during this process, some things can (and often do!) go wrong as they can’t be fully tested in the new environment until the big day.
Migration days can be stressful, so plan ahead to reduce this as much as possible! Try to time your migration at a point where it will have the least impact on your business – whether this is a quieter month or out of office hours.
Make sure that the key people in your migration team – namely your web developer, SEO specialist and key decision makers – are either with you or quickly available/contactable on the day to help quickly find and iron out any issues that might crop up.
9. Run a crawl
If there have been recent changes to the old version of your website, it’s worth running a final crawl just before migration. This will give you the most up-to-date information about URLs, meta data, links etc, which can be used to pinpoint any changes or issues if required.
Once the new site goes live, you can also crawl that using a tool such as Screaming Frog. Key areas to look out for in the first sweep include:
- Response codes – Important pages need a 200 response code. 4XX codes (starting with a 4, e.g. 404, 400, 403) are ‘client errors’ making pages unavailable to search engines. These include broken links or an error in the code etc. 5XX codes indicate server errors. Both 4XX and 5XX codes need evaluating and fixing.
- Indexability – Again, key pages should be indexable. If you see anything with ‘non-indexable’ in this column, you need to check what the problem is. Development sites are often noindexed to prevent Google finding the site before it’s ready for release. If these noindex tags are pushed across to your live site it will start to drop out of the search engine results.
- Content – If you’ve rebuilt your site on a new CMS, check that page titles, headings, meta tags etc have pulled across as expected.
- Security – Check the ‘security’ options for any errors such as mixed content, http URLs showing up.
If you’ve implemented redirects as part of your migration, then you also need to check that these are working as expected, and that you’ve not inadvertently created any redirect chains. Httpstatus is a great tool for batch checking redirects, and will flag up any errors or redirect chains.
10. Update links where possible
Even if you’ve implemented a redirect map, it’s still good practice to update links directly to the new URL where you can. This helps to speed up page response time and sends a stronger signal to search engines.
If this is a huge task, prioritise the internal links to your ‘money’ pages, whether these are key product pages, landing pages or service pages etc. If you have important backlinks, it’s also worth putting in a request for these links to be updated where possible.
11. Submit your new sitemap
This is another one relevant for websites which have needed a redirect map. To help speed up search engines finding any new URLs on your website (and working out where the old ones now go to!), submit your new sitemap.
Your sitemap URL is usually yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml – but check with your web developer or SEO if this doesn’t seem to be working. You can submit this URL to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and the crawlers will then start making their way through your new website and indexing the new URLs. You can monitor the progress and check for any errors on each platform.
12. Monitor the site
The last step of a website migration? Hold steady, monitor the site and resist implementing any big changes for the first 4-6 weeks after a migration. You’ll likely initially see metrics bouncing around everywhere in the first weeks, as search engines discover new URLs and work out how to rank them.
Like the point about making fewer changes at once, one of the reasons for this is that it helps you identify if a change in visibility is due to your migration or something else. Don’t worry about adding in some new content if this is needed for your business – just hold off on any major changes to existing content or other optimisations of the website if you can!
Once you reach 4-6 weeks after a migration, you should see the site rankings and organic traffic levels stabilising. At this point, you can start moving forwards with your new site and any further optimisations or changes you want to make!
Need some help?
Website migrations involve a lot of moving parts and it can be easy to get overwhelmed or miss something vital. At HeyYou!, we work alongside businesses to successfully migrate websites – whether that’s to a new domain, new CMS or something else! If you’d like to find out about having us on your team, get in touch via 📨 hello@heyyou.digital or 📞0115 990 2779 to have a chat.
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