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August 25, 2022

How To Migrate Your Website Without Destroying SEO?

How To Migrate Your Website Without Destroying SEO - Mediafy

Migration is never easy for any business and requires careful planning and execution. As the age of your business website increases, a migration process is necessary, which might be due to the outdated design of your website. To keep up with the daily updates in web design standards, experts recommend your site be redesigned every 2-3 months. Even though migration is tough, when done in the right manner, it often opens doors to new opportunities. If you are planning site migration, read on to know how to migrate your website without destroying SEO.

What Is Site Migration?

As per Google, site migration refers to the change of CMS, hosting provider, server, or other changes made with or without changing the website URL. Here are the migration types

  • Site Migration with URL changes: HTTP to HTTPS
  • Site Migration without URL changes: change of domain or server or hosting provider.

It is to be noted that a simple redesign in your site cannot be called Migration because it does not affect your basic SEO.

Why Is Migration Necessary?

A site migration helps get closer to an SEO-friendly website, improve site speed, and improve the site’s security. Site migration also enhances the user experience as the URL structure, and site navigation have improved. For any site, user experience and navigation are search engines’ most important ranking factors. Google always observes what changes have been made to your site and how you have improved to match the rankings’ standards. If all the changes are up to the standards, your site’s pages will rank higher in the Google search engine, generating more website traffic.

How To Migrate Website Without Destroying SEO?

Even though the migration process is not that easy, the process can lead to many other opportunities. Here are some of the tips to migrate without destroying your website’s SEO

1. Choose The Right Hosting Platform

Once you have made your decision for migration, the first thing to do is to find a perfect hosting provider. A good hosting provider with all technical aspects can handle your site’s SEO requirements. Before confirming a hosting provider, check on these things.

  • Technical, OS, and system versions of the hosting provider
  • The bandwidth of the provider
  • Should have good technical documentation and support

2. Select Of The Server Location

After choosing the hosting provider, it is time to select the server. The geographical aspect is also one of the important deciding factors in SEO. If you are targeting customers in Canada, your server location should be near Canada. The server’s location will also impact your SEO rankings and target audience.

3. Map All Your URLs

If you are making URL changes, you will need to give directions to guide Google and website users from old URLs to New URLs. If you have not been given the redirection guide, a 404 error will appear, negatively impacting rankings. Existing redirects should be migrated as well. Keep as many existing redirects as possible to lessen the workload. Always make sure your URLs are mapped before you test redirects and have backups.

4. Make Sure You Are Retaining Titles, Meta Descriptions, and HTML Markup

There are updations for Titles, meta descriptions, and meta titles every time, but when you are in the process of migration, then ensure that every page has the necessary and proper information with relevant meta descriptions.

5. Create A Back-Up

Since each website migration comes with an end goal, having comparable data is crucial for focusing your efforts on what matters. It grants you better insight and lets you know whether your site migration was successful. Here are some of the benchmarks that you should focus on

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console
  • Domain and Page Authority
  • Backlink Profiles
  • Site crawl and metrics status
  • Mobile Usability status
  • Page Speed Insights

6. Install SSL Certificate

Before changing the URL, you should install the SSL certificate on your server. The best way is to ask your hosting provider to install the certificate and once the installation is completed, check if it is working or not by navigating to the site.

7. Changing The WordPress Default URL

After the certificate is installed, it is time to change the default URL. When making changes, make sure that both WordPress (URL) and Site Address start with HTTPS. After making the necessary changes make confirmation by opening the new URL.

8. Choose A Launching Date

When all the migration process is completed, it is time to launch your new site. To ensure a smooth transition, avoid the site launch during peak and busy days. You must also avoid periods when Google launches major yearly updates, making it harder for you to detect technical issues later.

Things To Do Post Migration

After the migration process is completed, make sure that you follow these steps.

  • Monitor the Site Performance
  • Run Site Audits
  • Update the Platforms
  • Notify publishers of changes in URL and update the same in backlinks

Conclusion

Migration of your site is a process that makes your site faster and helps in the growth of your company. When the migration process is carried out successfully, your brand image will dominate the competitors and search engine rankings for years to come. While migrating your site, worrying about the past SEO growth is obvious, so our professionals can help you at this point. At Mediafy, we plan to retain your past SEO growth and successful migration. Contact us for more information.

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