Make Your Site Migration Go As Smooth?As Possible Without Losing Any Traffic

A poorly executed site migration can have a significant impact on search rankings and traffic.Changing your domain name, if necessary, or implementing HTTPS is a wise business decision.. Businesses, on the other hand, should be aware of how search engines will react to site migration. If not handled properly, a company's organic search ranking can suffer.

So, if you're engaged in the process of moving and would like to move your site in a smart way without losing any traffic this blog is for you..

Pointers To Keep In Mind While Implementing Site Migration

A professional SEO company can make recommendations to businesses or individuals for site migration, which is also covered below. However, if you want to perform a site migration on your own, there are several factors to consider when doing so, some of which are discussed below:

1. Think If Migration Is The Right Choice

Remember that site migration always results in a temporary loss of traffic. It takes time for Google to process and update it accordingly. Careful execution of site migration can minimize traffic fluctuations. Google will eventually treat the new site as the original. However, this is the best-case scenario.

Remember that site migration provides few SEO benefits. They do not remove search engine penalties.If you are migrating your website to make some SEO improvements, it is not worth it. However, there are some instances where site migration is considered advantageous:

If the site needs to be moved to an HTTPS version. (This is most likely the only case where site migration should result in some SEO benefit.)

For rebranding purposes.

2. Test Before Migrating

Always test your migration on a test server before putting it into production. Check that redirects work and that any other parameters are correct before making the migration public.If you do not thoroughly test the migration, it can cause your website rankings to fall by weeks and force you to double your recovery efforts.

3. Crawl The Website Before Migration

Crawling with a crawler tool like Screaming Frog and saving the crawl for later can help to ensure a smooth migration.

Make a complete list of all URLs on the old website so that nothing gets lost in translation. This opportunity allows for the detection of crawl errors and redirects.Ideally, during migration, remove or replace links that lead to 404 pages. (A 404 error message is displayed by a browser when it cannot locate or find the requested page on a website. If the page does not exist, users will see this error.)

Orphan pages (pages with no links) and external links should be updated as needed. For a smooth migration, your link game must be top-notch.

4. Only Migrate During Low Period

A dip is visible after a site migration. Just make sure that it’s a temporary dip. Every business has a high and low point during the year. You should try to migrate your site during the off-season.The thing is to lose traffic when the business is anyways, low so that it doesn’t affect you that much.