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A lot of people make a website without using WordPress and the issue with this is that it doesn’t have the capabilities of a WordPress site. This means that many businesses move over to a WordPress website because it is simpler and easier to use. The only issue with this is that it can be quite technical and switching everything from your old website to the new can lead to something going wrong.
In this guide, we are going to create the ultimate checklist to ensure everything is in place for your website migration to go smoothly. However, getting an SEO agency to complete all of these checks, whether it is a SEO agency in Yorkshire or a national-based SEO agency, will understand how a migration should work to ensure nothing is lost.
What To Do Before Your Website Is Migrated?
Back-Up Your Existing Website
Whatever website builder you have used, you should back up your website. You can use third-party tools are manually do it yourself however, only an experienced website builder should perform this task.
Create The Hosting, DNS, CDN and Mail
The next thing you need to do is create a staging environment to ensure everything goes smoothly and identify any errors before your new WordPress site goes live. If you are migrating a website that gets a lot of traffic, you will need to ensure nothing goes wrong or else you will lose that traffic.
In the staging environment, you need to test your redirects and ensure they are working effectively. Ensure there is no duplicate content on your new site as your site can be penalised with this. Switching hosting to WordPress can be simple however, it is also easy to get things wrong.
Once everything is on the staging site, you will need to complete the following.
- Transfer all files to your new hosting environment
- Set up your DNS information
- Change CDN information
- Change your mail parameters
Redirecting Your Most Important Pages
Once you have completed the previous steps, you need to begin your redirects. This means you need to redirect all of your core pages, including those which are ranking organically and those that receive traffic. These redirects will need to be completed in the cPanel which will have to be hosted.
Have The Right SEO Structure In Place
Your next step is to ensure you have the right SEO structure in place. You may have redirected your top rankings pages to your new site however, if you don’t have the correct SEO structure, you can wave goodbye to your traffic and rankings. You will need to ensure that all of the below are working effectively;
- Crawlability
- Custom URLs
- Alt Text
- Canonical Tags
- Robots.txt
- Structured Data
- Hreflang
- Mobile Setup
- Pagination
- Sitemap
- Internal linking
Review Key Site Pages
The next step that you need to do is review those pages which bring in the most traffic and revenue. You want to ensure everything is right with these pages because if there is something wrong, you can soon lose revenue.
Review the rankings of these pages once a website is migrated to ensure nothing has dropped too much. You can have a variety of page rankings and you can expect slight decreases but nothing too extravagant where you will lose all of your traffic.
Run Site Crawlers
The next thing that you need to do is run site crawlers to compare the old site with the new one. This will check broken website links, redirects and metadata. There are many tools that can be used for this such as Screaming Frog and Apify.
Complete A Full Site Audit
Your next step is a website audit which will check your internal links, server response time, redirects and, your no-index plus index information. Make sure that a robots.txt file is in place with canonical tags set up. Ensure all of your pages are running smoothly as well.
Create A Search Console For Your Website
Your next step is to create a Search Console for your new website to ensure you haven’t missed anything. On your Search Console, you will need to submit your XML sitemap.
If you already have a search console in place then all you will need to do is change the site address. This alerts Google of the change but you will need to verify that this change has been caused by you.
To Conclude
There are many things that go wrong with a website migration which is why you need to ensure that you get everything right. Following this step-by-step guide will help you achieve a successful migration but, it is also important to complete everything on a test site before you complete the migration.
Benchmarking all of your analytic data is something that is essential. Review your traffic levels and make a note of them. Once your migration is complete, you can then compare the traffic levels to ensure nothing is lost during the migration.
If a migration does go wrong, you can lose a lot of traffic and revenue and it can be hard to get that revenue and traffic back. Backing up everything does allow you to restore your old site to ensure you can gain some of it but, the damage can be already done. Good luck!