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A website migration is a term used to describe whatever significant changes to a website's setup which may impact SEO, such as changes to the domain, URLs, hosting, platform, or pattern.

There are many dissimilar kinds of migrations, only the basic steps for planning and troubleshooting are similar. Migrations can be highly complex as they often involve many people and moving parts. Don't panic if everything doesn't get every bit planned; you lot can fix well-nigh annihilation that goes incorrect.

In this guide, we'll cover:

• Preparing for a website migration
• Performing a website migration
• Testing and ongoing monitoring

Preparing for a website migration

You lot need to know what is irresolute and who needs to be involved for it to happen. In other words, yous need a plan and a place to track all the moving parts. Y'all'll demand to know all of the people involved, their function, deadlines, and have a process in identify to track everything. A project manager and project direction system helps with this. Trying to exercise it all in email and Slack can go out of command fast.

You also desire to have a rollback program, just in case something goes horribly wrong. You should always have a mode to go back to the original state, even if you lot only programme to use it in extreme situations.

You'll desire to know the impact of a move, so make sure y'all accept access to GSC and Analytics on the old and new sites (brand a combined view if needed to see both). Some changes may take a few weeks or even months where you may encounter flux, but others may not run across whatsoever changes at all. For instance, if yous're migrating a mid-size site to a new domain, I'd look a few weeks of flux. But if you're combining into an existing site, you may not come across whatever traffic disruptions at all.

You also want to do a bit of prep work. I suggest a few steps:

• Crawl your website. Yous'll apply this as a baseline to check for changes afterward on. Yous can utilize Site Audit for this.
• Create a set of examination pages such as those from the Elevation Pages report in Site Explorer. You'll use these later to cheque for errors. You may desire to go ahead and crawl these in a carve up Site Audit project so you tin can hands compare them later.
• Restrict access to your staging or dev site (if you have one) to prevent information technology from beingness indexed.
• Make a backup of your site, just in case you need to go back to it.

Performing a website migration

Precisely what's involved in a website migration depends on whether the URLs will remain the aforementioned or not. Below nosotros'll discuss both scenarios.

When URLs are the same…

This is typically a more straightforward motility—at to the lowest degree SEO-wise—since fewer things are changing. Information technology still may be a complex move, merely many of the tasks involved with these moves are typically more the work of infrastructure/DevOps or developers and not SEOs.

These migrations may include:

• Hosting: CDN, server
• Platform: CMS, language, JS framework
• Design: template, internal links, tags

If you are using a staging or dev site, it's best to become access to check for issues before you launch it live.

What to expect for

For this, yous're substantially looking for any changes, including things similar:

• Approved tags. These should be the same.
• Title tags. Brand sure these are the same or like to what you have. New systems may accept automated tag generation or some defaults that may be different than what yous had.
• Meta descriptions
• Heading tags
• Hreflang
• Schema
• Meta robots. Yous want to make sure your pages aren't noindexed.
• Content. This is particularly important for JavaScript systems. New systems may not have all of the content loaded into the DOM by default, so search engines may not encounter some of the content in some cases.
• Internal links. Things like breadcrumbs, related posts, footer links, or even the principal navigation may have changed.
• Speed differences

Use the comparison function of Site Audit to encounter changes since your final crawl:

There are a couple more issues that may create more than significant bug.

• If y'all accidentally get out a block in place, search engines tin can't clamber your pages.
• Sometimes older redirects aren't copied over from .htaccess files or server config files, and y'all'll lose some of the links that were pointing to your site. This one is tricky because it'due south harder to notice and often happens when irresolute hosts. Continue an eye on yourBest past links report in Site Explorer and filter for 404s to see pages with links that are now broken.

When URLs are different…

These migrations volition usually exist more than complex. The exception is moving from HTTP to HTTPS—which is pretty easy these days.

These migrations may include:

• Domain: changing domain, merging into another site, splitting a site
• Protocol: HTTP > HTTPS
• Path: subdomain/subfolder, changing site architecture

Specific to HTTP > HTTPS

• Use a Content Security Policy of upgrade-insecure-requests to fix all mixed content problems. It'due south quick to implement and works for all resources too things like internal links, which you still need to update yourself.
• Install a security certificate
• 301 redirect HTTP > HTTPS
• Add an HSTS header

I wouldn't worry most things similar a redirect chain on the root path or updating links to the site. Fixing the concatenation and updating links won't provide any benefits since signals consolidate because of the redirects.

Specific to domain changes

• Lower TTL  temporarily (a few hours for the value). This will refresh DNS caches faster and when you make the switch your changes will be seen by more users sooner.
• Use the change of accost tool  in GSC.
• Check the old domain for whatsoever manual actions that might be in place in GSC

Here'south a quick tip for Site Inspect users: if you alter the scope of your clamber in the project settings to a different domain, your new crawl will be on the new domain and you'll be able to compare it to the clamber on the old domain.

All

• Update internal links and links in various tags like canonicals, hreflang, etc. You lot may be able to use a discover and replace plugin to do this quickly for internal links.
• Setup GSC. This tin include things like transferring your disavow file, setting geo-targeting, URL parameter settings, and uploading sitemaps. You'll want to continue a sitemap with onetime URLs for a short menstruation of time. This will assist monitor indexing of URLs in GSC.
• Remove whatsoever crawling blocks for pages on the old and new site. Everything needs to be crawled for signals to consolidate properly.
• Make certain pages y'all want indexed aren't marked noindex. You tin use Site Audit for this.
• Redirect pages. You want to make sure old pages are redirected with a 301 redirect to the new versions of your pages. It'southward a adept idea to redirect things like images and PDFs as well, but don't worry about things like JS, CSS, or Font files. Focus on redirecting things that get indexed by search engines and don't worry about other file types.

You desire to catch changes as early as possible so if you take a dev or staging site, you should crawl this to make sure everything'south okay before pushing changes to a live site. Remember that if an onetime site was using HTTPS and the certificate expires, bots are passed but users will receive an error message and won't exist redirected. There are multi-domain certificates that embrace multiple sites that can help prevent this result.

If you see a drop, it's likely related to redirects, something not being able to be crawled, something noindexed, changes to the content or removing content, changes to internal links, or something that changed related to technical SEO.

Sidenote.

 If you're thinking about updating links to your site, y'all may want to update links from pages you control, but I wouldn't carp doing outreach to update links on other sites that point to you. They should consolidate properly with the 301 redirects. It'south non worth the effort to get them changed.

Testing and ongoing monitoring

In that location are diverse ways to scout the progress of the migration and make certain everything is progressing as it should.

With Ahrefs

There are several various means to look for changes. Every bit I mentioned earlier, y'all tin can change the scope of your clamber in Site Audit and go a comparison that shows yous what inverse. You'll want to wait out for changes to things like:

• Canonicals
• Hreflang. This will intermission for a while if you change domains since it volition take some time for pages to be re-crawled and connections made.
• Schema
• Meta robots

Remember how we created that list of top pages earlier? These are your priority pages. It's worth crawling that list in Site Audit to ensure things like redirects are in place and at that place oasis't been any significant changes. If you prepare a separate project for that listing ahead of fourth dimension, you lot tin can even do a comparison crawl to see changes on these pages quickly.

Yous can become folio traffic, keyword traffic and modify history with the Summit Pages and Organic Keywords reports in Site Explorer 2.0. It'due south easy to make comparisons for the aforementioned domain, but if you changed domains, you might desire to consign this data to Excel or Google Sheets to brand a combined view for different periods and meet where any losses may take happened.

You lot tin can as well use our crawler to brand sure your redirects are working properly, and links are redirected properly.

Here'due south the easiest way to do that:

1. Enter your domain into Site Explorer
2. Go to the Best by Links written report
3. Add a "404 not found" filter
4. Sort by referring domains

This will prove you lot pages with links to them that we encounter as 404 with our crawler. You might desire to redirect these.

With GSC

Google Search Console has a lot of information to help you with migration. For example, you can check for canonicalization bug using the URL Inspection tool. But enter the URL, and Google volition tell you what canonical they chose.

Beyond that, you can export GSC data and make a combined view of your traffic in Excel or Google Information Studio to lookout the migration better. You may too want to utilise a combined view of the folio or keyword data to troubleshoot any losses.

The Index Coverage study helps you see how your pages are indexed. If you've uploaded both the old and new sitemap files, you can watch the change in indexing and check for whatsoever issues hither. Past having the sitemap files, yous can get specific coverage reports merely for the pages in those sitemaps.

If you lot want to run into an overview of Google crawl activity and any identified issues, the best identify to look is the Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console. There are various reports here to assistance you lot identify changes in crawling behavior, issues with crawling, and give you lot more data well-nigh how Google is crawling your site.

You definitely want to look into whatsoever flagged crawl statuses like the ones shown hither:

There are also timestamps of when pages were last crawled.

Misc

If you didn't get a baseline crawl of the site and need to check for differences betwixt the old and the new, bank check archive.org to run into if they have a copy of any of the pages. They besides usually accept copies of robots.txt files from sites that can be useful to see if something went wrong and was accidentally blocked during the procedure.

If you don't have access to Google Search Console for a site, you lot tin still cheque canonicalization by pasting a URL in Google. Usually the first page shown volition be the canonical.

And once more, if you don't take access to GSC, many other problems related to itch tin can be checked in your log files.

Just a warning that the site: search operator sometimes confuses people. If y'all use site:, you're request what Google knows about a specific website. Simply because you see pages there doesn't mean that's how they're indexed or that there's a problem with the migration. I've seen this pb to people doing things like blocking the old site to keep the pages out of the index—which causes bug.

Continue monitoring

Some bug may show up long after migration is over.

• Monitor the quondam domain to brand certain it gets renewed, and do the aforementioned for whatever others you redirected to the site. If the domains expire, any signals passed through redirects from the older sites may be lost.
• If you didn't get rid of your erstwhile hosting and still go along redirects there, be enlightened that they'll break if information technology shuts downward—and yous'll lose some links. You can solve this past redirecting via DNS and storing the redirects on your new site.
• Make sure to go on security certificates renewed or switch to a multi-domain certificate, every bit nosotros talked nigh before.

Final thoughts

Migrating websites is no easy feat, and so it's time to gloat if everything went well. Withal, every bit this probably won't exist the final time you exercise a site migration, I'd propose getting together with those involved one more time to go over what went well, what went wrong, what you would change if you had to do it again.

Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.

hilllian1974.blogspot.com

Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/website-migration/

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