Migrating your website can be a huge addition to your company’s 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录 performance. For instance, it’s an excellent way to improve site speed and user experience, both of which are essential ranking factors in 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录.
However…
A poorly executed site move can have the opposite effect on your organic results. Your brand could totally disappear from the SERPs and take months to recover from such a huge hit.
That’s why it’s important to gain in-depth knowledge about site migrations, how they can hurt 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录, and how you can prepare your website properly for a successful site move.
Which is exactly what we’re going to teach you in the rest of this guide.
Let’s jump right in.
What is a Site Migration?
Google defines site migrations as the process of moving a website to a new CMS platform, hosting provider, or server. And that’s regardless of the changes that could happen or not happen to the site’s URL.
So, we can split website migrations into two types:
- Site migrations with URL changes — such as moving from HTTP to HTTPS
- Site moves with no URL changes, which often happen when you decide to move your domain to a new host or server
Now:
A basic site redesign, even when creating new pages, isn’t considered a site migration. Simply because that doesn’t have any impact on your 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录 performance.
Why Migration Your Website is Often a Necessity
A site migration helps you move closer to an 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录-friendly website by improving your site speed, core web vitals, and site security. It also enables you to enhance the user experience by improving your URL structure and site navigation.
Those are some of the main ranking factors for search engines today.
On top of that:
Your audience will notice little to no changes on your website as the migration occurs. You’ll get visitors from all the traffic sources you had before, including traffic from organic results, visitors from direct links, and your social media followers.
The best part of it all?
Google will observe how you’ve improved your site to better match its standards and ranking signals. In return, your pages will get even higher rankings and generate more organic traffic in the weeks following the site update.
How a Site Migration Could Often Hurt 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录
In an ideal world, your site move will be perfect in all its stages.
Every step in the migration process goes successful — and it all ends with your 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录 results going through the roof.
But in the real world, things can go wrong all the time.
A single mistake can significantly hurt your 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录 progress and have the opposite effect of what you wished for. That’s even more likely to happen with larger websites with a more complex structure.
The results of a failed site migration can be:
- A decrease in the number of high ranking pages in the SERPs
- A massive drop in traffic from various sources (mainly organic traffic)
- Manual penalties from search engines (for duplicate pages, broken links, crawling issues)
- Algorithmic penalties for not following Google Webmaster Guidelines
The good news is:
You can avoid all these losses if you’re careful with each step in your site migration. In the rest of this guide, you’ll learn what you can do to ensure a successful site move and maximize your 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录 results.
How to Perform A Site Migration Without Hurting Your 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录
To simplify the process for you, we’ll divide the process into three stages:
- The Planning Stage (Pre-Launch)
- The Development stage (Launch)
- The Monitoring stage (Post-Launch)
In this part, we’ll dive into each phase separately:
The Planning Stage
It’s essential to be clear from the start on why you’re migrating your website. Unless the benefits are obvious and worth the move, it’s better to keep your website as it is.
If you decide to go with the migration, here’s what you should do first:
1- Back Up Your Site
Before you even think about a site move, you need to back up all current site files as well as your database. That can be done automatically in various ways, depending on your CMS and hosting provider.
The reason why you need to back up your site is simple:
Most issues with the site migration process are hard to predict and will emerge as you go. Thus, it’s crucial to have a working version of your site as a backup to roll back to in case things don’t go as planned.
2- Benchmark Current Data
Benchmarking your data will prove essential in later stages when you need to compare the new results to your old ones.
Since each website migration comes with an end goal, having comparable data is crucial for focusing your efforts on what matters. It grants you better insight and allows you to know whether your site migration was actually successful.
Here are the details you should focus on in your benchmark:
- Google Analytics (traffic sources, sessions and users, bounce rate)
- Google Search Console (Highest ranking pages, average CTR, number of clicks/impressions)
- Domain authority/page authority
- Backlink profile
- Site crawl status and metrics
- Mobile usability report
- Page speed insights
3- Choose a suitable Launch Date
To ensure a smooth transition into your updated website, you want to avoid peak hours and busy days. Migrating your site during such times will amplify the negative impact of the site move on the user experience.
You must also stay away from periods when Google is launching major yearly updates as that makes it harder for you to detect technical issues later on.
The Development Stage
In this phase, you’ll take a closer look at the effects the migration might have on your website. You’ll anticipate any issues you may encounter and try to prevent them before they occur.
4- Create a New Sitemap