At some point, many organizations need to make significant changes to their website’s structure or require a change in branding, which requires a site migration. This can be a significant undertaking that can lead to potential downtime for a business and to certain implications for hard-earned search rankings.
That being said, this doesn’t mean that a successful site migration can’t take place while also minimizing the potential disruptions they can bring. Still, before you decide to start the process yourself, there are some essential things you should consider.
What are the Factors Influencing SEO Migration Duration?
The time it takes for you to successfully migrate your site to a new hosting platform or a different CMS (Content Management System) will depend on a variety of factors. These can include:
Size and Complexity of the Site
The amount of content currently on your site and the overall structure you have in place will greatly influence the length of time it takes to migrate. Depending on how many elements you have and how integral they are to your branding, this can sometimes create bottlenecks that you’ll need to get passed manually.
While modern CMS systems are designed to make your website’s structure relatively pain-free when exporting and importing code to new platforms, the longer the process will generally take, the more features you have.
Scope of the Migration
Not all website migrations are a direct copy and paste of features into a new shell. Many times, the scope of a migration will vary based on several different scenarios. These situations might include:
Simple Website Redesign - As a business grows, it often modifies its vision and marketing objectives over time. This often requires cosmetic improvements to its branding and a website refresh.
Platform Change - Sometimes, the current CMS platform being used by a business may no longer meet its requirements. For example, some B2B (business-to-business) companies may decide to start selling to end users directly, meaning they now require a platform that can support e-commerce sales.
New Domain Name - If a company wants to rebrand, it often needs to establish a new domain name. Site migrations allow assets and backlink profiles to be transferred to the new location.
Structural Improvements - In other situations, a website’s structure may require a complete overhaul, requiring significant changes or improvements.
Number of Available Resources
An organization's available resources in the form of budgeting and its ability to prioritize site migration activities will impact how smooth or rocky a site migration goes.
A site migration will typically require involvement from multiple departments and coordination with both internal and external stakeholders. Most organizations have limited amounts of flexibility in these areas that need to be considered.
Experience with SEO
Not all businesses have in-house teams with experience in digital marketing and SEO. If this is the case, a site migration can experience delays and lead to poor execution strategies. This is why it is essential to work with qualified site migration professionals who can help an organization avoid common pitfalls during the process.
Key Steps to a Successful SEO Migration
An important thing to consider about site migrations is that they can potentially impact your SEO if handled incorrectly. To ensure a successful migration while minimizing any major changes in your website rankings, there are some important steps to follow:
The Planning Stage
The planning stage is one of the most critical elements to get right before starting your site migration. The time and energy you put into this part of the process will dictate the pace and efficiency of your site migration.
During this process, you must set clear goals for your migration strategy. This involves identifying the highest priority items that need to be addressed and establishing the right milestones for achieving those objectives.
Establishing clear objectives for your site migration is part of ensuring you can meet realistic timelines for the project. This lets you track your progress over time and keeps everything on schedule.
Establishing a Pre-Migration Checklist
To make sure your site migration follows the right progressive path, you’ll want to create a pre-migration checklist before beginning.
When creating a pre-migration checklist, you’ll want to do a comprehensive audit of your website in its current condition, taking full inventory of all of your digital assets and the site's navigation structure. This also includes noting each individual URL and any external links pointing back to your website.
Another part of this process should be creating a complete backup of your website content if you ever need to revert to a preexisting version of the site after experiencing issues during the migration.
The Migration Stage
During the migration stage, you’ll execute your plan and take the systematic steps necessary to move your current site to a new location. Depending on the size and complexity of your current website, this process can take some time and will require you to move all of your content, databases, plug-ins, and various configurations to a new server.
While a direct copy of a website over to a new platform may not take a considerable amount of time, if your plan is to improve certain functionality or enhance features of your current site, the migration process can be much more complicated.
Post-Migration Tasks
After a site migration is completed, a variety of additional tasks need to be completed. One of the most important steps is to thoroughly test the site to look for any apparent errors.
An effective way to test your site is to reference your pre-migration checklist and benchmark your older metrics against your new ones. This includes your links' status, keyword rankings, and visitor analytics.
Hopefully, following your migration, you won’t have to make too many adjustments in configurations or the layout of your new website. However, if you run into potential issues, your historical data can help you quickly identify any significant discrepancies with your new site structure and address those issues accordingly.
How Long Does It Take for SEO Metrics to Return to Pre-Migration Levels?
When businesses finish a site migration, one of the most commonly asked questions is how long it will take for their SEO metrics to return to normal. It’s very common to see fluctuations in search engine rankings after completing a site migration. The time for sites to see a normalization of their rankings can range anywhere between a few weeks and several months.
The more pages of content a website has, the more likely it is to experience a larger shift in SEO metrics. Google’s algorithms take time to fully crawl and index websites, and the more changes your site undergoes, the longer it will take for those changes to ripple across search engines.
Common Pitfalls Experienced During Migrations
All site migrations have their own set of challenges. However, many of these roadblocks can be successfully avoided by understanding the common site migration pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Poor Strategy
Although not all site migrations may seem complicated, not having a well-defined strategy can lead to a number of delays. Oversimplifying the process, not establishing clear guidelines, or not allocating resources properly can cause several setbacks that can cost the organization time and money.
Inadequate Planning and Scoping
It’s not uncommon for a website migration to start uncovering new site requirements once a site starts to populate on a new server. Sometimes, certain technical issues or unexpected errors may occur that you weren’t planning for. This is why it's important to have contingency plans put in place before a migration is executed so that the organization can avoid costly downtime with their site.
Late SEO Involvement
Most site migrations are organized due to a lack of core functionality or the need to support certain rebranding efforts. The problem is that while a new platform or server might help address these issues, the SEO impact they can have isn’t always considered until it’s too late.
Early in the process, it’s important to consider all implications associated with a site migration for individual page rankings and the potential temporary disruption it can cause to web traffic and revenue sources.
Slow Development Response Times (75 words
Taking too long to address important technical issues in your migration can lead to much longer timelines for completion. This can be highly taxing on internal development teams and be disruptive to other important business processes.
Best Practices for Ensuring a Smooth Site Migration
To help you make your site migration a success, here are a few best practices you can follow:
Detailed Planning and Preparation - Don’t neglect the importance of adequate planning and preparation before beginning a site migration. This includes auditing your current webpage rankings to use important post-migration benchmarks, mapping all of your current URLs, and making complete backups of databases and configuration files prior to getting started.
Clear Communication with Stakeholders - A site migration can be potentially disruptive to a number of departments and company stakeholders. Because of this, it’s important to communicate to all parties the objectives of your migration and the timelines you’re targeting for completion.
Continuous Monitoring and Optimization - It’s critical that you track the success of your migration over time. This is especially the case when ensuring the changes you make to your website’s domain name and server don’t have lasting negative impacts on your SEO results.
Make Your Site Migration a Success
Migrating your website to a new platform or server doesn’t have to be a lengthy or overly complex process. With the right planning and strategies in place, you can ensure your site migration goes smoothly while minimizing its impact on your business and search engine rankings.