Site Migration Checklist: SEO Challenges — Serpstat Blog

Before you seek the right website migration SEO checklist, you must understand the target goals you want to achieve:

• Your rebranding requires changing the site’s domain name. That’s when a site migration takes place.
  
• Switching to a new server or from HTTP to HTTPS will be safer and more reliable, thanks to a custom migration checklist for websites.
  
• Apart from altering your UX/UI design elements, opting for a platform’s mobile-friendliness will also require this procedure.
  

Site Migration Risks

The prospect of site migration is quite an intimidating and appealing idea for several SEO specialists. Nevertheless, a lot is at stake — you challenge the stable flow of your domain to pursue better results. If you don’t plan the procedure with potential risks in mind, your chance of failure is pretty high. Here are some of the most typical hazards to consider to mitigate them carefully and diligently:

• While declines in organic traffic ratios and rankings are a standard outcome, they have to be temporary. If you witness a sharp fall or a continual slide in these parameters, it is a crucial red flag to pay attention to. Among the reasons, there might be issues with backlinks, which have a negative impact if they lose their authoritative value and are inaccessible. Your organic visibility may also suffer because of a poorly performed URL mapping.
  

• If not done properly, page migration can result in poor conversion rates. By checking the user behavior and further site audit, you can find the core of the problem.
  

• Since this process involves so many crucial changes to the way your site works, it may disrupt its accessibility for search engine crawlers. In turn, your platform can’t be indexed properly and loses its development and scalability potential after migration.
  

How to Do a Website Migration

Without exaggeration, a poorly planned and executed website migration process is one of the fastest ways to devastate your online visibility and overall brand performance in SERPs. 

With the SEO checklist below, interested parties can build a successful and versatile modification and update strategy for their platforms, whether a blog or a large e-commerce site.

Plan the Move of Your Site

A lot can be said and done about your preparation before you take any steps to migrate pages or switch to a new server. Considering your target platform’s specifications and adapting classic migration moves to your demands and expectations is a great tactic. That’s why estimating the overall process’s complexity is crucial and proceeding with the plan’s realization in chunks. It will help you be more attentive to detail and avoid beginner mistakes.

URL Mapping

The mapping process entails keeping a record of all your existing URLs to compare to those following the big web migration. If they don’t coincide, you might suffer significant SEO penalties. Not only do you have to create this list, but you also have to consider what URLs require redirects. By introducing 301 redirects, you can tell Google your old pages aren’t meant to influence the new domain’s performance and visibility. It will also forward ranking signals from the old URLs to the new ones.

During the Site Migration

One of the best pieces of advice is to harness the real power of the testing and check your site’s performance cycle during the migration in practice. This way, you can implement all the essential elements like titles and meta descriptions qualitatively and ensure their efficiency before the updated domain’s launch in search engines.

In Serpstat, you can add a new website address and track both domains using your chosen keywords:

After the Site Migration

Once the process is over, here are some things you need to do:

• Audit the site. Review your newly migrated website meticulously to ensure everything functions as expected. Check for any broken links, missing content, or other issues that may have arisen during the migration process.
  

  If you locate indexing issues, try fixing them as quickly as possible to come back on track. Along with the site’s crawlability, check whether your domain hasn’t broken any of Google’s guidelines because of the recent changes. Don’t let a sharp decline in organic traffic because of ineffective backlinks go unnoticed.

• Check Performance. Keep a close eye on the performance of your new site. Monitor its loading speed and user experience to ensure a seamless browsing experience for your visitors. 
  
• Update external links. Reach out to the owners of external websites linked to your old site. Maintaining these backlinks is crucial for your website’s authority and search engine ranking.
  
• Execute marketing campaigns. If you have marketing or promotional campaigns planned for the new site, it’s time to execute them. Launch these campaigns to maximize your site’s visibility and engagement.
  
• Monitor log files. Keep a vigilant eye on your log files, especially for strategic pages. Monitoring log files helps you promptly detect and promptly address any anomalies, security issues, or unusual activity.
  
• Track new URL performance. Analyze the performance data to make informed SEO decisions and adjustments.
  

SEO Migration Checklist

First things first, it is a good idea to examine the SEO structure of your domain before migrating websites. This way, you get actionable insights on what to do when the process is complete. The secret to a successful procedure is making lists and going over them repeatedly. Here is a brief selection of parameters your website migration checklist SEO is better to include:

• sitemaps;
  
• pagination;
• URL structure;
• setup for mobile devices;
  
• Hreflangs;
  
• robots.txt;
  
• internal links;
  
• canonical tags, and so on.
  

Let’s take a closer look at what tactics will contribute to any website checklists:

• Start by determining the SEO goals of the process. Set measurable and clear objectives to achieve. Your strategy will be more comprehensive, letting you succeed from A to Z. Define whether you are interested in boosting your domain’s usability or upgrading your site’s architecture. Such considerations build the core of your migration tactics.
  
• Consider different types of migration sites to boost your performance monitoring strategies. While project managers will positively influence the general coordination of the project, content makers will cope with content migration, and SEO experts will ensure the quality of SEO results before, during, and after the project’s final stage.
  

• Determine the ideal time to carry out the project. The rule of thumb tells SEO specialists to focus on off-peak user engagement hours to minimize prospective limitations and inconveniences for the platform’s target audience.
  

Wrap It Up

All in all, using advanced migration checklist templates helps you to be more prepared for migration process’s challenges. SEO performance fluctuations are natural, and different crawling and indexing pages of Bing, Google, and other search engines might influence the project’s speed.

Please don’t get discouraged if something goes off — it might happen even with the best of us, especially given how many unforeseen outcomes you can face. No matter what, it is crucial to be adaptive and ensure the versatility and flexibility of the chosen approach to migrate webs. A precise and step-by-step strategy is the blueprint for an efficient and satisfactory migration.

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