There are some essential Website Migration Tips that you should follow. Make a backup of your site, plan ahead, and audit your website before the migration. Also, test your migration. By following these simple tips, you will be able to avoid making a mistake and move your website to a new domain successfully. Don’t let your website go to waste. Use these tips to help you make the most informed decision for your website migration. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy these Website Migration Tips!
Plan ahead
The best way to avoid the problems associated with website migration is to plan ahead. Make sure to migrate your website during times when your site’s traffic is low, and not at peak times, when the transition may be disruptive to your users. If you’re running a seasonal business, a web migration mistake may leave you unable to recover from the resulting downtime. Whether your migration is a one-time project or an ongoing one, it’s crucial that you plan ahead.
To plan ahead for website migration, identify all the key stakeholders you’ll need to make the change. Depending on your audience, you’ll need to prepare for both best and worst-case scenarios. To avoid frustration and wasted resources, consider collaborating with an SEO expert who can provide tips on ensuring a smooth transition. To avoid migration horror stories, you need to know what content will be affected by the move. If you’re not sure, run a content inventory of your website.
Audit your site
Performing a thorough website audit before a website migration can help you prevent a major loss of visibility. Even if the migration only affects your website for a short time, it can give you the opportunity to improve your site’s technical performance and boost your search visibility. Whether you are planning to migrate your website to another hosting provider or you want to make some changes to your site before launching it, an audit will help you determine what you can improve and what you can’t.
A website audit should identify any issues with the content. Do you have a blog? If so, does it contain interesting articles? Alternatively, is the site poorly optimized for mobile devices? These are all important questions to ask yourself before deciding to migrate. Regardless of your migration plan, you should follow a checklist of issues to ensure a successful migration.
Performing a website audit prior to a migration can help you determine if your site’s current SEO is working properly.
Make a backup
Before you migrate your website to a different hosting platform, you must make a backup of your website. Generally, you should back up all aspects of your site before you make any changes. If something goes wrong, you can restore your website to its previous state with the help of your backup. You can create a spreadsheet with the existing URLs of all the pages on your site before the migration begins. However, make sure to do the backup to your own website and not upload it to a cloud server.
Moreover, you should back up your website regularly. Breaking links can lead to website failure and will trigger search engine penalties. Therefore, a backup is crucial before the migration. You must also ensure that your website works properly before you migrate. The domain name you have registered is managed by a central authority that ensures that DNS servers update information about your domain. So, make a backup before moving it to another hosting platform.
Test the migration
You should test the migration process before the actual move. To do this, you can export your website’s data from Google Search Console (GSC). You can use the URL Inspection tool to check for canonicalization issues and use the tool to determine Google’s choice. Once you’ve exported your data, you can export it to Excel or Google Data Studio. These combined views of page and traffic data will help you track the migration process and troubleshoot issues that you may have encountered.
Before performing a migration, make sure you define the scope of the project. You should include the data you’re migrating as well as any excluded data. You should also have a clear migration guide with detailed steps. Any errors and missing steps should be reported. If you’re doing manual testing, be sure to pull the migration script from the version control repository. Then, you can perform a variety of manual and automated tests to identify errors and other issues.
Resolve duplicate content
During a website migration, one of the most critical things to do is resolve duplicate content. If you want to be able to rank well for your targeted keywords, you’ll need to make sure your website doesn’t have duplicate content. This problem is often caused by third-party content that’s been republished on your site. Typically, this content comes from the manufacturer or the retailer and is referred to as generic product descriptions.
There are many ways to fix duplicate content issues during a website migration, including leveraging canonical tags. These tags can help distinguish the original version from a duplicated version. One important way to avoid duplicate content is to create a better navigation structure. You should create URL structures that differentiate legitimate landing pages from pages for filtering results. The canonical tag must appear before the “?” parameter in the URL to be ignored by Google Search Console.
Ensure a single 301 redirect
Using a 301 redirect is a critical part of your website migration process. Not only do they help you preserve domain authority, but they also send web traffic from other URLs owned by your organization to the new site. This helps ensure that your website remains visible and maintains its importance to users. You may want to learn more about 301 redirects so that you can set them up properly.
Upon completing your site migration, you should update all resources. Making sure that everything is updated is crucial since outdated resources can result in broken links or mixed content. You will also need to redirect your old domain. A 301 redirect tells search engines that your website is now on the new domain and passes authority to the new location. The goal of a
301 redirect is to get a single page to be seen by Google and other search engines.