9 Step-by-Step Guide to a Successful Website Migration

Do you want to migrate your website but are worried about impacting its performance and tanking its rankings?
Website migrations can be useful, but they are never without risk. That’s why it’s important to follow a proven process. Here are the 9 Step-by-Step Guide to a Successful Website Migration.

Below, I’ll explain what a website migration entails, draw up a checklist you can use when migrating your website, and explain each step of the process in detail.

What Is a Website Migration?

A website migration is a change to your website that’s so significant it impacts the site’s structure, performance, or traffic.

The most common form of website migration is moving from one domain to another. But transitioning from HTTP to HTTPS and changing your URL structure are also types of migration.

It is necessary for your business to migrate its website, and it has numerous advantages in some cases, but you must be cautious. You could crash your site, cut your traffic in half, or affect your site’s usability to the point where your revenue plummets.

Those risks may sound scary, but all of them can be overcome by following a tried and tested site migration strategy—just like the one I will cover below.

Still, you shouldn’t ignore the danger entirely.

Migration has the possibility to derail your site’s performance, traffic, and other metrics, so you need to treat it as a major project and assign the resources (and budget) it deserves.

Website Migration Checklist

It’s helpful to have a checklist to follow because website migrations can be difficult and complicated. When moving your website, use this checklist as a reference and tick off each step as you go.

• Define why you want to migrate your website.
• Establish measurable objectives and goals.
• Set a budget and timeline for your migration.
• Start assembling your team.
• Draw up a marketing plan to promote your new site before launch.
• Put a content freeze in place.
• Crawl your existing site, and create a repository of all your pages.
• Create a 301 redirect plan that maps your existing content to your new site as accurately as possible.
• Run tests in a closed environment to check that redirects work and pages load as expected.
• Work out how you will track the success of your migration.
• Execute the migration.
• Track the impact of your migration for a year and make improvements as required.

Now you know what to expect, let’s cover each step in more detail below.

9 Steps on How to Do a Successful Website Migration

Below, I’ll cover all of the checklist steps in more detail. I recommend reading through the advice before getting started with your website migration.

1. Define the Goals of the Website Migration

Start your process by defining why you are migrating your site and its look. Do you need to transfer the entire site to a new domain name, or will it only affect a portion of your current site?

There are many reasons for a website migration, including:

• moving from HTTP to HTTPS
• reaching a wider audience with a better domain
• taking your site international
• increasing search traffic
• improving your site’s design

By defining your reasons for a site migration, you can draw up a set of sensible objectives and goals.

For instance, if you’re moving your site to HTTPS, an objective may be to retain traffic levels. On the other hand, you may want to grow traffic if you’re moving to a .com domain for the international reach.

It will also help you to plan better going forward. As John Mueller says, everyone’s heard a migration horror story.

You don’t want to create a new one.

The best solution is to be as diligent and prepared as possible.

Speak to as many people inside and outside your business as you can. IT experts, SEOs, designers, analytics teams; they’ll all have invaluable opinions and advice on how to get it right—but also explain what can go wrong.

2. Set Website Migration Budgets, Timelines, and Teams

Now you know what you’re trying to achieve and why it’s time to create a website migration plan that includes:

• a sensible budget
• a timeline
• the teams and their responsibilities

Having a clearly defined strategy is crucial. Your website migration won’t happen in a day. It’s a complex process with several moving parts and requires great communication between different team members to achieve success.

After you’ve finished reading this post, it’ll be simple to establish your timeline. Simply break down all of the tasks on this list into deliverables, assign them to the appropriate teams, and set reasonable timeframes for each of the deliverables. Set up a project management platform like Wrike, Trello, or Asana to make it easier for everyone to interact and work in a single location.

A cross-department team will have the best chance of success. System admins, developers, SEOs, designers, UX developers, copywriters, and more will all have a part to play in a successful migration, so make sure everyone has a seat at the table.

Finally, keep in mind that your migration will almost definitely cause some downtime during the process. To keep the number of visitors affected to a minimum, it’s better to schedule migrations during low-traffic times (such as late at night).

A website migration shouldn’t cost a lot of money if you have the correct people on staff. I’ll go over a few tools that can help you streamline the process, and they’re not too pricey.

Nonetheless, it’s a good idea to set aside a contingency fund in case the worst happens and your migration encounters issues that only an experienced consultant can resolve.

3. Promote Your New Website Before the Website Migration

Getting everyone to comprehend that your website has relocated is one of the most difficult aspects of site migration. A 301 redirect will ensure that old links aren’t a complete waste of time, but if they’re left inactive for too long, they’ll lose their value and mislead clients.

It’s relatively simple to tell Google that you’ve changed URLs, but it’s a lot harder to get the message across to your customers. That’s why the best migrations include a pre-migration promotional campaign that teases the new URL to customers and gets everyone on board with the move before it happens.

There are several ways you can do this. Start by creating a coming soon page on the new URL while working on the background migration. Promote the new URL using email and social media to customers and the press. The more buzz you build before launch, the smoother the migration will be.

Take care not to lose out when people still search for your old URL or brand name, either. Create a page on the new site that will rank for your old brand name and explain the move. Set up PPC ads on Google to rank for queries related to your old name or URL. Paid campaigns targeting your new brand name can also limit the fall in traffic that may occur directly after the migration.

4. Pull All Website URLs From Tools for the Website Migration

The vast majority of migrations will involve changing URLs. If this isn’t the case for you, you can skip this and the following step. If not, roll up your sleeves because this is where things get serious.

It starts with creating a content map.

Before you can go ahead and migrate your site, you need a complete picture of all your content. This will allow you to see which URLs need to be directed, which don’t and where’s best to point them. Creating a content map will also highlight existing errors like bad redirects, 5xx errors, and pagination issues that you can fix before migrating.

You can use a couple of tools to pull all of your existing URLs and create a content map, but Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is probably the best choice. It will extract all of the URLs on your website, find broken links, errors, and redirects. It’s free to use if your site has less than 500 pages. Otherwise, you’ll need to pay £149.

Of course, don’t add new pages to your site while you’re creating your content map. Freeze content on your site at least a month before getting started with your migration.

5. Create a 301 Redirect Map for Your Website Migration Starting With the Most Valuable Pages

Once you’ve got a list of every URL, export the CSV file into a spreadsheet. Next, go through each URL one by one and note which need to be redirected and which don’t.

While you should endeavor to account for every single page, this simply won’t be possible on very large sites. That’s why you need to prioritize your efforts and focus on the pages that matter most.

Which pages are they? Typically these will be pages that drive the most traffic or generate the most revenue.

You’ll want to redirect a legacy URL to the most relevant new page possible.

Avoid redirecting a legacy URL to your new homepage at all costs. Firstly, this will lead to a poor user experience.

Second, Google has said that soft 404 errors would occur if pages are redirected in a large number. Consider building a new page or eliminating the legacy URL entirely if one doesn’t exist.

Before you do anything else, double-check that your new site’s URL structure is correct, and then consider making adjustments to improve your site’s SEO. It’s not a good idea to waste time creating content for URLs that will be modified when the site goes live.

6. Do a Test (in a Closed Environment) of Your Website Migration

You wouldn’t buy a new car if you didn’t test drive it first, would you? Similarly, transferring your website should be a breeze. When the whole migration goes live, a thorough test in a closed environment can help you detect faults or issues that, if left unchecked, will wreak havoc on your site’s UX or traffic.

For a variety of reasons, you’ll want to test the transfer in a closed environment. To begin with, any changes you make won’t have an impact on the live site. Second, keeping the previous site up and running allows clients to use it while also giving you a point of reference for your adjustments. Third, if everything goes horribly wrong, you may simply go back to the open world and start over.

What kind of migration you are making will determine when you can start testing. For instance, if you’re launching a new design, you can begin testing it as soon as it’s developed. In general, the earlier you start testing, the better.

The earlier issues get noticed, the more time you’ll have to address them. Some errors you may be able to live with.

Others could ruin your site’s future (and get you penalized on Google).

There are several things you should be checking in the test. These include:

• site architecture
• usability
• mobile responsiveness
• metadata
• internal linking
• search functionality and other site features

Remember, this is a team effort.

Don’t give one person sole responsibility for testing the migration. It’s easy for one person to miss a typo or an error, especially when they’re operating outside of their expertise. It’s a lot harder for a multi-disciplinary team to miss things.

7. Set Up a Process to Track Your Website Migration

As I mentioned at the start of this post, you’ll want to keep track of specific metrics to see how successful your migration is. Set up tracking before you start the migration to ensure that everything goes smoothly.

If you don’t currently utilize an analytics program like Google Analytics to track the performance of your website, do so today. Then, for at least a few weeks, keep an eye on how your site’s top pages and traffic levels are doing.

This will provide you with a set of performance and traffic metrics that you may use to assess the migration’s future impact.

You’ll also want to use a tool like Ubersuggest to track your site’s rankings and monitor changes over time.

8. Execute the Website Migration

It’s now time to finish your website migration if you’ve followed all of the procedures above. It’s likely taken you weeks, if not months, to get to this point, but if you do it right, it’ll be well worth it.

Regardless of how long it took to get here, speed is now a must. The key is to get the job done as quickly as possible. Because you’ll have to shut down your site to migrate, it’s critical to avoid a lot of downtimes. The longer you don’t update your site, the more likely it is that your rankings will suffer as a result.

After you’ve finished the migration, double-check that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking search engines, try out a few different redirections (particularly those on your most important pages), and finally, upload your new XML sitemap to Google Search Console.

9. Track Your Website Migration and Make Improvements as Needed

If you thought executing the migration was the final step of the process, I’m sorry to disappoint you. The last thing you need to do is track your migration’s success and improve where needed.

Keep track of the metrics you defined at the outset of the process and use them to compare yourself to others in the weeks and months ahead. Are they up to par with what you’re looking for? This is fantastic if that’s the case! If not, you’ll have to figure out why it’s not working.

Following a migration, it’s typical to see a shift (and maybe a loss) in traffic and rankings, but a major and long-term dip can indicate bigger problems, usually due to poor redirection procedures.

You’ll also want to keep an eye on the legacy site’s traffic and ranking. Over the course of the year, these should progressively go to zero. Double-check to see if any of the pages that are still getting visitors are being redirected.

After a year, if everything goes according to plan, you may relax and enjoy your new site instead of worrying about tracking it.

Frequently Asked Questions About Website Migrations

How long does a website migration take?

Depending on the size and complexity of your website, a migration can take less than an hour to complete, but months to organize the entire shift.

How much does a website migration cost?

A small site’s website transfer shouldn’t cost a lot of money. Your website should not cost more than $500 to move. Larger or more complicated sites, such as those with a lot of pages (such as those for businesses or eCommerce), can be a lot more expensive.

If you rebrand or redesign your site at the same time, those costs are in addition to the migration.

How do I prepare for a website migration?

You can do a number of things to prepare for a move. Create a content map of your complete site, as well as a timeframe and a migration team, as well as a budget.

What software do you need for website migrations?

To transfer your website, you’ll need a website crawler, an analytics tool, and a keyword ranking tracker.

Conclusion: Website Migrations

Although a website migration may appear difficult, you should not be afraid to move on.

To correctly migrate your website, read up on the best technique to adopt while rebuilding your website and follow my step-by-step instructions to effectively move your website This should provide you all the information you’ll need to keep your rankings and traffic up.

When it comes to your website, what is the reason you’re doing it this way? Comment below and let me know what you think.