Make Your Site Migration Smooth Without Losing Any Traffic

The improper site migration has enough capacity to demolish your website performance that causes loss of traffic remarkably.  Being A team of an experienced digital marketers, we want to share some effective tips for easy and smooth website migration.  So that you won’t lose any traffic. Therefore, SEO remains virtually unaffected after migration.

Transforming website URLs from HTTP to HTTPS or modifying domain names is considered to be the strategic business move, but in this process, you can’t ignore the search engine result of the website. If you ignore your website SEO status, you may lose a significant amount of website traffic.

Below we’ve mentioned tips to make your website migration process smooth without hurting SEO status.

1. Check whether website migration is really the best option for you:  A site migration commonly causes transient traffic loss as Google takes enough time to load all data of your old website and properly index them. Thus you need to plan your migration meticulously with nominal traffic loss.  If you process site migration strategically Google will start treating it as the original one. Basically, Site migration offers very few SEO benefits and doesn't annihilate search engine penalties. Thus SEO executives choose strategic site migration which won’t hurt SEO health. They also work on webpage restructuring, content development, and fixing broken links as well.

2. Utilize a Sandbox:  You should start the process of site migration after testing each component of your website over a test server.  Check whether all redirects are working correctly or not, and verify other essential components privately before launching the site.  Try to accomplish everything in a single shot to determine any technical error. If you miss any technical error of the website, it will take your website back by months.

3. Start migrating during the slow Phase:  A strategic website migration will not hurt your website ranking as well as the count of organic traffic. So, you’ve to think about the short-term drop. We would suggest you migrate your website during the slow period of the business year when users’ activity is minimum.

4. Crawl it before migration:  Start crawling your website by using a trusted tool and save it for further use in future. Please ensure to have the complete list of URLs on your website, so that you do not lose any URL after migration. Crawling by a trusted tool gives you enough opportunity to identify any crawling issue. Here you can replace or remove links that show 404-page errors during the process of migration. In addition, we also suggest updating links that redirect pages to make them point to the final page.

5. Measuring analytics:  In order to measure the amount of traffic loss after a site migration, it is essential to save a copy of Google Analytics data. If you detect any traffic loss, export the new website’s analytics data to continue a parallel comparison with the data from the old website.  Thus, you have a clear idea from which pages your website loses traffic. If you find a page from where traffic is getting lost, it means the authority transfer of this page didn’t happen correctly.

6. Document New and old URLs:  Being an established website owner you should make a list of both old and new URLs. In general, all of your old pages must be transferred to a new site during migrating. If you miss any page, you’ll substantially lose a huge amount of search engine traffic which drops you in a big loss.  Thus listing out old and new URLs is one of your mandatory jobs. In addition, if you lose many pages from your website, Google will consider that site as a new website, not at all similar to its old one which may lead to a drop in rankings.

7. Update Internal links: Ensure that each HTML interface on your new site should highlight the new site and not the bygone one. Leaving the connections unaltered, in light of the fact that they would, at any rate, divert to the new URL can be a terrible choice. Other than dialling back the site execution, the side-tracks might hamper your PageRank. The perfect way to re-establish the links is by doing a search and making a correct replacement.  Updating replacement should be done in such a way that it updates the name of the domain without altering the framework of the folder, it means only the text within the URL will be updated.

8. Eliminating duplicate content: yes duplicate content or plagiarized content may interrupt the website migration process. Duplicate content is very harmful to your website's health. Thus try to check all webpage content before initiating the migration process.  Take necessary steps to remove the copied content. SEO services India says that if different forms of a URL are published, that may lead to content duplication at the technical level. This technical issue can be resolved by proper self-canonicalization. Additionally, they also suggested setting up redirect rules in. htaccess to make a single version of the page URL.