Website migration is when anytime a large amount of pages or content move from old URLs to new URLs whether it be migrating an entire site to a new domain, a subdomain to a subdirectory, or simply merging a small site into a bigger one. There could be reasons varying from switching https://, going international to rebranding.
Site migration can be a daunting task for client as well as for the one who’s executing it. It is important to make your client aware that search engines do not provide any detailed or step-by-step documentation on this topic, as otherwise they would expose their algorithms. Therefore, we have divided this task into six major phases:
- Planning the migration
- Implementing the migration
- Monitoring the migration
- Post Migration testing
- Launching new site
- Measurement of Success
Let’s discuss these phases and what to bear in mind in each of them:
Phase-1 Planning the Migration
This requires the following:
- Allocation of time and effort in migration
- Assuming the loss of traffic and ranking drop
- Keyranking maintenance
- Head Traffic maintainance
- Clarity on the objective of migration
- Create a sitemap of the new site
- List down all URLs of the new site
- Benchmark current rankings and traffic
- Register and configure the new domain in Google Search Console
- Generate an XML Sitemap for the new domain
Phase-2 Implementing the Migration
This step mainly entails actions on the legacy (current) site. This includes taking care of:
- Hosting/ IP address
- Domain Name
- URL structure
- Site Architecture
- Content
- Design
Steps to be done in this are as follows:
- Crawling of the legacy site
- Exporting of the top pages by ranking
- Exporting error pages
- Measurement of site performance
- Measurement of current rankings
Phase-3 URL Redirection Mapping
Here’s what all you can do under this phase:
- Drop all legacy URLs, which were identified and saved in the CSV files earlier (during phase 2), into a new spreadsheet (it’s safer to name it SpreadSheet1).
- Remove all duplicate URLs using Excel.
- Populate the page titles using the SEO for excel tool.
- Using SEO for Excel, check the server response headers. All 404 pages should be kept into a different tab so all remaining URLs are those with a 200 server response.
- In a new Excel spreadsheet (let’s call this SpreadSheet2) drop all URLs of the new site (using a crawler application).
- Pull in the page titles for all these URLs just like you did in step 3.
- Using the VLOOKUP Excel function, match URLs between the two spreadsheets.
- Matched URLs (if any) should be removed from SpreadSheet1 as they already exist on the new site and do not need to be redirected.
- The 404 pages which were moved into a separate worksheet in step 4, need to be evaluated for potential link juice. There are several ways to make this assessment but the most reliable ones are:
- SEO Moz API (e.g. using the handy Excel extension)
- Majestic SEO API
- Depending on how many shredded URLs were identified in the previous step, a reasonable part of them needs to be added into Spreadsheet1.
- Ideally, all remaining URLs in SpreadSheet1 need to be 301 redirected. A new column (e.g. Destination URLs) needs to be added in SpreadSheet1 and populated with URLs from the new site. Depending on the number of URLs to be mapped this can be done:
- Manually By looking at the content of the old URL, the equivalent page on the new site needs to be found so the URL gets added in the Destination URLs column.
- If no identical page can be found, just chose the most relevant one (e.g. similar product page, parent page etc.)
- If the page has no content pay attention to its page title (if known or still cached by Google) or/and URL for keywords which should give you a clue about its previous content. Then, try to find a relevant page on the new site; that would be the mapping URL.
- If there is no content, no keywords in the URL and no descriptive page title, try to find out from the site owners what those URLs used to be about.
- Automatically – By writing a script that maps URLs based on page titles, meta description or URL patterns matching.
- Manually By looking at the content of the old URL, the equivalent page on the new site needs to be found so the URL gets added in the Destination URLs column.
- Search for duplicate entries again in the old URLs row and remove the entire row.
- Where patterns can be identified, pattern matching rules using regular expressions are always more preferable because that would reduce the web server’s load. Ending up with thousands one-to-one redirects is not ideal and should be avoided, especially if there is a better solution.
Phase-4 Post Migration Testing
In this phase take care of the following important steps:
- Block the crawler access
- Prepare a robots .txt file
- Prepare XML sitemaps
- Prepare HTML sitemap
- Fix Broken links
- Check for any 301 redirects
- Optimize the redirects
- Resolve any duplicacy in content
- Monitor site and robots.txt
Phase-5 Launching New Site
You have to keep in mind the following:
- Notify Google via webmaster Tools
- Manual Checks
- Monitor crawl errors
- Update most valuable inbound links
- Build fresh links
- Eliminate internal 301 redirects
Phase-6 Measurement of Success
In the last phase which is mainly to track the impact of the migration, measure it by the following:
- Indexation
- Rankings
- Open site Explorer Metrics
- Google Cache
- Site Performance in Webmaster Tools
And for a layman who’s simply a secondary member in the process, bear in mind the following:
- Understand the stakes.
- Make sure no content is missing.
- Carefully redirect every URL.
- You need a (cross-functional) migration team.
- You need a pre-launch plan.
- You need a post-launch plan.
- Use tools.
Hope this helps for a smooth site migration and restoring your position back!