Planning a website migration? Whether you’re moving to a new domain, switching platforms, or giving your site structure an overhaul – there’s one thing you can’t afford to ignore: technical SEO.
Done right, a migration can improve your site’s performance. Done wrong, it can lead to lost rankings, traffic dips, and a frustrating user experience.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through:
- What a website migration involves (and the different types)
- How to prepare with a clear pre-migration checklist
- Key steps to take during the migration to protect SEO What to monitor afterwards to keep things on track
- Common mistakes to avoid
At Logic Digital, we specialise in website migrations and hosting & maintenance – so if you’re planning a move, we can help you do it the right way, without putting your hard-earned SEO at risk.
Why does technical SEO matter when I migrate my website?
Whether you’re moving to a new domain, switching platforms, or restructuring URLs, ensuring that your SEO remains intact is crucial.
Migrating a website overlooking SEO can lead to traffic loss, ranking drops, and a dip in user experience – all things you want to avoid during the process.
This guide will walk you through best practices for a smooth website migration while preserving (and – why not – enhancing) your SEO performance.
First things first: the basics of a website migration
Website migration refers to significant changes in a website that can impact its structure, content, design, UX, or location.
There are different types of website migrations, and each comes with its own unique challenges and considerations. Here are a few examples:
- Domain migration: this type of migration involves changing the primary domain of a website, for example, moving from oldsite.co.uk to newshinysite.co.uk. This type of migration requires a capillary strategy for redirect mapping and extensive monitoring to ensure search engines properly transfer rankings to the new domain.
- Platform migration: this type of migration entails moving from one CMS (or content management system, basically the platform you use to edit your website) to another, such as switching from WordPress to Shopify, Joomla or a proprietary bespoke CMS. This often involves changes in URL structures, content formatting, and functionality, making SEO audits before and after the migration essential to protect your hard-earned rankings.
- Structural migration: this kind of migration involves major changes to website structure, including URL hierarchy modifications, category restructuring, and navigation updates. Without a proper URL mapping strategy, valuable SEO link equity (link juice, for friends) can be lost. This is something that you definitely want to avoid as it can greatly impact authority, an important measure for SEO.
- HTTPS migration: when you perform a HTTPS migration, you’re moving from HTTP to HTTPS for security reasons, often to comply with modern web standards. While this is a necessary upgrade, it must be handled correctly to prevent duplicate content issues and ranking fluctuations.
- Content migration: when a website undergoes a redesign or content overhaul, there is a risk of losing important SEO-friendly pages, internal links, and metadata. It’s essential to maintain high-performing content and optimise the new structure accordingly.
Each type of migration requires careful planning to maintain SEO link equity and ensure you don’t lose authority and rankings in the process. Understanding the impact of each change helps mitigate risks and ensures a smooth transition.
Where to start: pre-migration checklist
While this might sound a bit cliché, trust us: a successful migration starts with meticulous planning.
It’s important to have a plan mapped out to protect and improve your SEO performance during a website migration, here are some steps to consider before you start migrating your website.
Get a benchmark of current performance
Before making any changes, gather as much data as possible about your current website performance. There are several ways to do this:
- Conduct a full website crawl using tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or DeepCrawl (now known as Lumar) to get a snapshot of your current URL structure, metadata, and internal linking.
- Export all URLs, including title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and response codes. This serves as a reference to ensure nothing gets lost during the migration.
- Gather data from Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics to identify your highest-performing pages through the various available reports, sources, and user engagement metrics.
- Identify top-ranking keywords and their respective pages to ensure they are prioritised in the migration process. SEMRush or Ahrefs can be a good starting point to do this.
- Create a list of backlinks pointing to your domain using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz. High-authority backlinks should be preserved with proper redirects.
Make your website migration plan
A detailed migration plan helps prevent unexpected issues. Consider the following:
- Outline and track all changes being made, such as domain switches, URL modifications, or CMS transitions. A simple tracker made in excel showing task owners, task status and any applicable comment or action can go a very long way here.
- Define roles and responsibilities, ensuring that developers, SEO teams, content content marketers, and UX designers collaborate effectively. Think of a migration as a project to be managed (it is one, indeed!) and put your best project manager hat on.
- Don’t be scared of using Gantt Charts or any other visual tools to help you staying on track of progress.
- Set a realistic timeline that includes extensive testing periods, allowing for thorough checks before the final migration.
- Ensure staging environments are properly set up, blocking them from indexing with robots.txt and noindex tags.
Mapping redirects (301 redirects)
Redirects are crucial in preserving SEO rankings and improving user experience. A well-executed website migration needs a structured redirect strategy including:
- Mapping old URLs to new URLs in a one-to-one manner wherever possible
- Avoiding redirect chains and loops, as these can slow down crawling and indexing
- Preserving the internal linking structure by updating internal URLs rather than relying on redirects
- Keeping the most valuable pages unchanged if possible to minimise SEO disruptions
Time to get the ball rolling: executing the migration
Once you’ve planned the migration, it’s time to implement it properly.
Here are some processes you want to keep on your radar to preserve SEO value for your website during the migration:
Implementing redirects
- Use 301 permanent redirects for all moved URLs to signal search engines that the change is permanent. 302 redirects should be avoided unless strictly necessary.
- Implement redirects at the server level using .htaccess for Apache, Nginx configurations, or Cloudflare settings. If that is not possible, consider using your CMS redirect plugin.
- Test a sample of redirects before full deployment to ensure accuracy.
Updating internal links
- Replace old internal links with new ones within the content, navigation menus, and footers.
- Update canonical tags to point to the new URLs rather than the old ones.
- Review and update structured data to align with the new URLs.
Ensuring proper indexing & crawling
- Update XML sitemaps with new URLs and submit them to Google Search Console.
- Remove any disallow rules from robots.txt that you might have put in place on testing environments once the migration is complete to allow crawling.
- Use “rel=canonical” tags correctly to prevent duplicate content issues during migration.
Post-migration monitoring & fixes
After the migration, continuous monitoring is crucial to ensure SEO stability.
Checking Google Search Console & Analytics
- Monitor search engine indexing to ensure that new URLs are being picked up
- Track organic traffic trends and keyword rankings for any unexpected drops
- Identify and resolve any crawl errors or redirect issues
Conducting a post-migration website audit
- Use Screaming Frog in combination with Ahrefs or SEMRush or a similar tool to verify that all redirects are functioning as expected.
- Identify and fix broken links or 404 errors as a priority.
Backlink & outreach management
- Contact webmasters of high-authority sites to update backlinks pointing to old URLs if possible.
- Use link reclamation strategies to maintain SEO value.
Performance & UX checks
- Ensure page speed remains optimised after migration. GTMetrix or Google Page Speed Insights (PSI) can help you with that.
- Validate mobile usability and Core Web Vitals to avoid user experience issues. You can do this through Search Console.
Common SEO pitfalls to avoid for website migration
- Ignoring 301 redirects: failing to set up proper redirects can lead to massive traffic and ranking losses. Don’t lose all your hard-earned SEO authority and rankings due to this simple mistake, prioritise your redirect mapping strategy.
- Blocking search Engines Indefinitely: forgetting to remove noindex tags from staging environments can prevent new pages from being indexed.
- URL Changes Without Proper Mapping: unnecessary modifications to URLs without redirects can lead to lost rankings. Unless necessary, we don’t recommend changing the URL structure of a page.
- Consider the long-term value of URLs (don’t mention specific years, for example) and update your pages to be evergreen ones if you do have pages that mention specific years in the slug.
- Not Monitoring Post-Migration Data: skipping audits and crawls after your migration is done can lead to undetected technical issues that impact performance.
Stress-free site migrations with Logic Digital
Website migrations can be complex – but with the right support, they don’t have to be stressful.
From planning and redirects to hosting and ongoing maintenance, Logic Digital helps businesses migrate their websites smoothly while keeping SEO performance front and centre.
Thinking of migrating your site? Get in touch with us at Logic Digital and let’s make sure your next move is a smart one.
