A poorly planned site migration can, quite literally, break your website and destroy the hard work you’ve spent on your site’s search engine ranking.

Being unprepared for a major website change is like being unprepared to move houses. You need to do a lot of advance work to pack up your old house, change your utilities services, book a moving company, reroute your mail to your new address, etc…and the same goes for moving your website. The following steps will help you steer clear of issues and plan your path to a successful site migration.

1. Migration Timing

As long as your migration is well-planned and well-executed, your site traffic should not be permanently affected. However, you should be prepared for a temporary decrease as your new site is re-indexed by search engines. Because of this, it’s best practice to plan your migration during a typically slower period in your business cycle. Do you have a regular off-season or annual slow period? If so, that’s when you should plan your migration, so that if your traffic does decrease as part of the process, then at least it’s decreasing during a period of slow traffic anyway.

2. Advance Site Crawl

We see many companies miss this very important step, which is crawling their site (with a tool like Screaming Frog, for example), prior to doing any migration work. This crawl will give you a complete list of all of the URLs on your current site so that you can ensure they are properly set up or redirected when the migration is complete.

You can also use this list to help you find any broken links or redirects existing on your current site, and use this opportunity to fix them at the source so you aren’t carrying over any links that point to a 404 page, or long redirect chains, which can cause a lot of issues in the future. It’s best to just clean up any links that point to a redirected page so that they point to the final page as part of your final migration.

3. Mapping URLs

Once you’ve crawled your current site and have a list of all URLs, you should create a spreadsheet or Google doc to track all of these existing URLs and the new URLs you want them to map to as part of the migration. Ideally, the URL architecture or skeleton of your new site should closely mirror your current site, otherwise search engines may get confused and conclude that your new site isn’t the same as your old site, which may cause you to lose your rankings.

4. Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content competes with each other on your site, and will make search engines only return results for one of the pages, instead of all of them.

Here are some ways you can avoid duplicate content issues during your migration:

• Ensure all page title tags and meta descriptions are unique, and contain relevant keywords
• Ensure IP addresses redirect to URLs
• Self-canonicalize all new pages to avoid URL query strings from preventing duplicate content
• Ensure only HTTP or HTTPS is used
• Ensure site search result pages are non-indexed

5. Redirects

A final step of any migration is the redirect process, as once redirects are live, that means your site has essentially been migrated. Make sure you link any affected URLs to their new location, on a one-t0-one basis.

Try to avoid redirect chains (ie: where you have your initial URL being redirected to URL “B”, and then later you decide to move this to URL “C”), and, where possible, redirect straight from URL “A” to URL “C”.

On a similar note, try to avoid redirect loops, where URL “A” redirects to URL “B”, and then back to URL “A” again. Screaming Frog is a useful tool that can help flag these in their redirect chains report, so even if you don’t think you have any loops, they might be able to find some for you to correct.

The most important part of finalizing your redirects is to test them before going live. Start with your highest-traffic or highest-ranking pages, and ensure those page redirects are 100% accurate and working so at least if you don’t have time to audit your entire list of URLs and redirects, you have focused on those that give you the most SEO and traffic value.

6. Analytics

Make sure Google Analytics is installed on your new domain, and that it’s active prior to your site going live to the public. Regularly monitoring your analytics will allow you to keep an eye on your traffic levels and be immediately notified if there is a dramatic decrease or change. Having Analytics installed from the beginning will ensure no data is missed between the old and new domains.

7. Technical Audits

Once your site is fully migrated and live, keep an eye on your Search Console errors over a month or two to ensure nothing was missed. A regularly scheduled technical site audit will help you to find any potential issues so that you can work to resolve them right away, and limit the effect they may have on your rankings.

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Ignoring any of the steps above is a surefire way to have an unsuccessful site migration, and lose valuable traffic (and business!) as a result. A site migration is a serious project and should be undertaken only with a high level of planning and execution, or by enlisting the help of website development or SEO specialists who can take ownership and walk you through every step of the process.