There are a variety of reasons why you want to move your website to a different hosting company. It is possible that your present website development service does not provide you with all of the features that you need, or they are charging more than your designated budget. Whatever the cause, there are a variety of methods to prepare for the big shift without negatively impacting the website experience for your customers.
Changing the location of your site may be difficult, particularly if you are unable to afford to be unavailable for an extended length of time. The most significant delay is often the time it takes to transfer your website’s DNS registration to your new provider, which may take several weeks or months based on when you start the process.
In this blog, we will guide you in preparing for migration and cover all of the actions you need to complete the process. You may utilize our step-by-step approach as a starting point for relocating your site and then construct your overall strategy.
Introduction to Website Migration
A website migration defines any activity that modifies a website so much that it may impact the website’s visibility in search results. For example, move the site to another domain, update the structure and style of the website or introduce additional content to the website.
Your relocation to your website may influence your visibility on SERPs by optimizing your SEO. It is a technique to enhance your visibility in your search results by customizing your website for search engines and visitors, such as building a fast, mobile website.
If you modify your website dramatically, such as changing it to a different domain name, this may influence how search engines perceive your website. If you do not perceive the link between your old domain name and the new one, this may damage your website ranking.
This causes limited traffic if you have a lower ranking. Since the top five results generate 68 percent of all clicks, companies have to keep their search results high or won’t get visitors, sales, or leads.
That is why businesses must take the migration of the website very seriously and draw out a strategy for them.
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Develop your migration strategy for your website
Firstly, you must establish your migration strategy on your website, which helps you do achieve the following objectives:
- Establish your migration’s scope and schedule
- Assign leads and migration tasks to a specific individual
- Establish migration criteria for each job
- Create a budget and description of necessary resources
A migration strategy for a site does not take place in one day. It’s going to take time and patience. Your company will need to interact with various team members, from developers, managers, and SEOs, to find out who will lead and support the project.
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Create a loop with your website upgrades product development team
Next, you want to collaborate with your website upgrades design and development staff. For example, if you are rebuilding your website, this stage will involve evaluating wireframes, comments, and more.
If your website migration extends beyond design, you may work alone in your development team at this stage. For example, the developers may increase your site’s overall performance and create further procedures to maintain page speed, such as picture compression.
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Get your technical SEO in order for the move to take place
Once you have completed the designs on your website, you may proceed to this stage. Your SEO experts will define and create the technical SEO requirements for your website in this phase of your website migration strategy, and the development team will subsequently launch your site.
Here are some standards that must be included:
- HTML sitemap
- Redirects
- URL structure
- Internal Linking
- XML sitemap
Your SEO should do the following in addition to creating technical SEOs protocols:
Crawl your current site
- Benchmark the performance of your current website such as its rankings and speed
- Export the Google Search Console data from your current website for future reference.
If you migrate a website that needs redirects, such as migrating from HTTP to HTTPS to a new domain name, your SEO must also produce a document outlining the intended directions.
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Make your new website live and put it through rigorous testing
Even while this stage may be completed after the previous three, it is also possible to begin it sooner. For the sake of stating a point, let’s examine the following scenario: If you’re releasing a new web design, you may start testing it right away after your development team begins working on the site.
You should make certain that your site is not available to search engines at all times when you begin testing it. It’s important to note that search engines will not crawl and index your website if you haven’t transferred the information from your previous site to it.
By restricting access to your website to certain IP addresses, you may prohibit search engines from discovering it and indexing it.
During the testing phase, you should use a checklist of things to test. Some of them are given below:
- Scrutinize your website’s architecture.
- Check the accessibility of your website
- Ensure that your page is accessible on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones
- Evaluation of internal connections on your website, such as the navigation bar, header, and footer hyperlinks
- Examine your website’s title tags, text, meta descriptions, and other elements.
- Ensure that your website works properly, such as by loading pages quickly and keeping a reasonable page speed, among other things.
- Examine your text file, HTML sitemap, XML sitemap, and structured data to ensure they are all correct.
For effective outcomes, you’ll want to send a large number of team members to investigate the website location. One person may notice a mistake on one page, and another person may see a broken button on another page.
You can identify and solve problems more quickly when you have different viewpoints.
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Migrate the site
Finally, you will reach the migration stage of your website. It may take weeks or months to accomplish this stage. However, your efforts till now will enable your business to start a successful transfer to a website. Speed is an important factor while moving your site.
For example, if your migration demands that your website be inaccessible to the user, you will still try to minimize the downtimes. This is because your website will also be down for search crawlers, which may damage your visibility if it stays that way too long.
Once the first migration is complete, perform these steps:
- Confirm that your file robots.txt does not obstruct search engines
- Check the redirects, especially your most visited pages
- Upload your Google Search Console XML SiteMap
These three steps allow your company to detect serious mistakes, such as inadvertently disabling your robots.txt search engine. Moreover, they will assist you to migrate your website easily, by sending your site to your Google Search Console.
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Follow-up on migration to your website
Although the website migration checklist has been completed, your team has to monitor your site. In the days, weeks, and even months after your site transfer, your rankings and traffic need to be monitored regularly.
Your rankings and traffic on your website may assist warn your company about website migration problems. While it is typical to notice a reduction in traffic and grading just after a transfer, long-term decreases may signal an issue with the migration of your site.
For example, you may harm your rankings if you neglect redirects. Search engines such as google can’t notice that you’ve moved that page or material to another website without redirecting. In this case, your business loses your ranks, which substantially affects your visitors.
To track your traffic, use Google Analytics, and to analyze your ranking, use Google Search Console. You may also use commercial tools, such as SEMrush or Ahrefs to look at your website’s search results.
Final Remarks
When broken down into the above-mentioned basic stages, the procedure isn’t all that tough. All it really needs is to take care at every stage and to allow yourself to return until the last possible minute to the original form in case of any problems.
Also, if the new site is essentially not the same as the past one, clients will require some an ideal opportunity to become accustomed to the new look and believe and adapt themselves with the new scientific classification, client ventures, and so on Such changes at first contrarily affect the site’s transformation rate, which ought to work on following half a month as returning guests are getting increasingly more used to the new site. Regardless, making information driven decisions about the new site’s UX can be unsafe.
Yet, these are simply broad general guidelines and should be thought about alongside different elements. For example, if a couple of days or weeks after the new site dispatch huge extra changes were made (for example to resolve a specialized issue), the relocation’s assessment ought to be driven further back.
It’s solely after you’ve investigated all the above regions that you could securely close if your relocation has been effective.
Best of luck and on the off chance that you need any discussion or help with your site movement
