How to Migrate Your Building Materials Website Without Losing Your Google Ranking

There are a few common reasons for building companies to migrate their websites. You might be:

• Switching from HTTP to HTTPS to improve your site security
• Moving to a new server or host provider
• Changing your domain name 
• Adopting a new CMS
• Updating the design and structure of your website

All of these are great improvements. There’s only one problem with them: they might affect your SEO.

Your SEO is what determines where you rank in Google results. It can make the difference between thousands of potential customers finding your website each month or barely getting any visitors. 

Thankfully, there are steps you can take to keep you from slipping in the rankings even while making major changes on the back end of your website.

10 Steps for a Successful Website Migration

1. Lay the Groundwork

A good plan will always save you plenty of trouble and frustration. During a website migration, it can also save your traffic.

Start by crawling your entire website to create a comprehensive list of all the pages on it (including URLs, their corresponding HTTP status codes and the SEO metadata for each page). 

Once you’ve got this roadmap in place, you have to make sure that every single page on your current website will redirect visitors to a corresponding page on your new one.

2. Block Search Engines from Crawling Your Staging Website

You want your new site to be assessed and ranked – but only once it’s ready. 

Until then, restrict search engines from crawling your new website by writing the right directive in the robots.txt file or setting a username and password in .htaccess.

If you’re going for the former option and want to block crawling to your entire site, add these two lines of code to the robots.txt file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

3. Update Title, Meta Descriptions and Canonical Tags

These are the HTML features that are essential for your SEO, so make sure they match the corresponding pages on your original website.

Canonical tags are the trickiest of these three. They’re also one of the most important. They tell search engines that a given page is a master copy of another URL, which helps manage duplicate content. Make sure the rel=”canonical” line of code doesn’t slip through the cracks.

4. Design a Custom 404 Error Page

When a visitor tries to access a page that doesn’t exist, they’ll run into a 404 Error page telling them the page is not found. 

Instead of losing on all that traffic, create your own 404 page that will help point visitors back to your homepage and increase the odds of retaining those users. 

5. Update Internal Links

If you simply copy the content from your old site to the new one, a lot of the links included in your pages will point back to the old site.

When the visitors navigating your page click on one of these, they’ll be taken back to the old version instead of remaining on the new one.

To avoid that, every single internal link needs to be replaced with URLs pointing to pages on your new site.

6. Canonicalize Taxonomy Pages

Whenever you put out new content, almost every CMS will categorize that page across various taxonomies.

That isn’t such a bad thing on its own. However, if those taxonomy pages have not been canonicalized, search engines will flag your website as creating duplicate content, which will bump you down in the rankings. 

7. Configure Web Analytics

Set up Google Analytics for your new site before it goes live so you can get feedback on how the new website makes its first steps post-launch.

8. Audit Your New Site for Errors

Before launching, conduct a comprehensive technical SEO audit for the following issues:

• Crawl errors (make sure search engine bots can actually access your site)
• Meta tags
• 404 errors
• Content consistency
• Canonicalization issues
• Broken links 
• Redirect chains and loops
• Validate redirects

9. Launch Your Site

After launching, generate an XML sitemap containing all the new URLs and submit it to Google Search Console as well as Bing’s Webmaster Tools. This will help these search engines re-crawl your newly launched site.

Make sure you remove any of the restrictions on search engine bots that you might have implemented (like in step 2 of this list).

10. Check Your New Site’s Performance

Prepare daily analytics reports for your new site. Compare the fresh data against previously established benchmarks to identify any underlying SEO issues. 

Keep track of metrics related to site speed, ranking, indexed pages, backlinks and organic traffic for at least six months post-launch.

Hire Professionals

This only scratches the surface of the things you need to know before migrating your site. It’s a complex process and getting it wrong can cost you the website traffic that is the lifeblood of your digital sales strategy.

For that reason, you should consider hiring SEO consultants to make sure the whole process goes as planned. If those professionals help you keep your spot in Google’s rankings, they will be worth every penny.