Website migrations happen all the time, usually because your existing website just isn’t good enough for you any more. What was fine when you were a small start-up is now looking a bit embarrassing when you’ve got nationwide coverage. It may be that you originally built the site on a platform that just doesn’t scale to what you need, or perhaps it’s been abandoned by its original developers, and you’re stuck for new features and security fixes.
The task of switching to a whole new website is largely a technical one, and as any of the developers here can tell you, isn’t one to be taken lightly. It’s not something to shy away from, sometimes a business just needs a brand new website, but don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s a piece of cake. Also, please be careful about setting optimistic deadlines. A rushed site migration is something to avoid.
Aside from the technical aspects of building a website, you also have to think about your marketing of that site. Even if you’ve never done any active marketing on your old website, there are still things you need to consider when the new site goes live. Your website is almost certainly indexed by search engines, you need to make it easy for them to understand how the new site works. If you’re actively doing paid marketing, either search or social, then you really need to plan out what needs to be updated in those campaigns before your new site goes live.
Site Migrations and SEO
Whatever you do, if you launch an updated version of your website, your organic search performance will take a hit. How big a hit it takes and, more importantly, how quickly it recovers are things you can manage.
The biggest issue will be if you have a new URL structure for your site. This means the search engines won’t know where your new pages are, and will suddenly be asking why your old pages are all now broken. The first thing to do here are to make sure you have updated sitemaps with your new URL structure and get those submitted to the search engines the moment the new site goes live. This will speed up how quickly your new pages are indexed, and the search results should be updated much faster with the new structure.
The other task can be more onerous, especially if your old site had a particularly large number of pages. You need to create redirects from the old page URLs to the new ones. If your /blog/ pages are now under /news/ but otherwise the same page slugs, that’s simple you can wildcard the whole lot. If every single page has a new slug then you’re going to have to implement individual redirects one by one. This has two key benefits: the first is that your users will still find whatever they want to see, regardless of how they come to your site (non-updated search results, old links in social media posts or emails, or backlinks from other sites), the second is that it reinforces the respidering of your website and ensures your linkjuice is being retained.
It’s important to get the redirects right. You only want to be redirecting each user once when they visit an obsolete URL. Too many redirects will be slow (bad for user experience), cause security issues which will make the browser show an error, and search engines just don’t like it.
SEO and New Domains
Should you be changing your website to a new domain, there’s another step you need to take to keep the search engines up to date on your new address. For those who might not know the term a domain is the core part of your website address. Why would you change this, you may ask, but rebrands and mergers happen, or you may just be wanting to make use of a newly launched domain extension to help your address stand out. This is what we did when we moved from yellostudio.co.uk to yello.studio.
Once you’ve sorted your 301 redirects, you can inform Google of your change of address. This is done through Google Search Console, under settings (for the old website address). You need to verify your old and new domains, then you just tell Google that one has been moved to the other. Bing used to have a similar tool in the Webmaster Tools, but they’ve removed it.
Paid Search and Social
Changes to your URL structure would mean your paid ads need to be updated. Advertising platforms, especially Google Ads, really don’t like it when your landing pages don’t work. They also don’t appreciate your ads pointing to URLs that redirect, especially if that redirect goes to a different domain. So, the first and most important thing to do is update your landing page URLs. You don’t want to be wasting money and your customers’ time by sending them to pages that don’t work, let alone risk running afoul of advertising policies.
With a new site, it can be a good time to review your landing pages for relevance and UX. Whatever you’re advertising, the landing page you send your paid traffic to needs to be as relevant as possible to the users who choose to click on your ads. If your ad is for pink widgets, you want the user to land on a page where they can buy your pink widgets, not to your homepage where pink widgets are all mixed in with blue gadgets and white gizmos.
Whatever your products or services, you’re paying for these visitors, so you need to follow the first rule of business: make it as easy as possible for the customer to give you their money.
If you offer anything that comes under special rules for your chosen advertising networks (financial services, healthcare, etc) you will probably have additional steps to take upon migration. These rules generally involve a verification process, which can be a real pain in the bum and need to be followed to the letter.
Technical Aspects
New site, new page structure. You need to be sure that your pages follow all of the best practices. This means page titles and descriptions that are relevant and useful for humans to read, while also paying attention to the foundations of SEO and paid advertising optimisation. Whatever structured data you use on your website needs to be compliant with the Schema rules. Don’t let your Core Web Vitals scores slip, suddenly dropping from a 90 to a 45 would have a detrimental effect on your SEO (especially for mobile) and UX.
It is vital that URLs return the right HTTP response. If a page has moved, it should be a 301, if it doesn’t exist it should be a 404, and if it works fine, it should be a 200. If this doesn’t happen, search engines might see your new pages as being spammy copies of your old pages, simply because the search engine doesn’t recognise that the old page is no longer there.
It’s important to pay attention to all of the behind-the-scenes elements as well. Your pages must be spiderable and indexable, so make sure you don’t accidentally upload the robots.txt file from your staging site that blocks every search engine from crawling your website (don’t forget any CDNs as well). Make sure the SSL certificate for your new domain is valid and in place before your new site goes live.
Meh, Site Migration is Easy! What Could Go Wrong?
Honestly, a lot can go wrong. Depending on how you’re marketing your website, you could:
Have all of your pages removed from organic search results.
Have your advertising accounts suspended or even cancelled.
Spend thousands, or even tens of thousands, of pounds/dollars/euros sending interested visitors to pages that simply don’t work.
Make a complete fool of yourself to your superiors, colleagues, shareholders, third-party contractors, and most damningly, your customers.
Redirecting old URLs to pages that have no bearing on what the old page was about means visitors to that page are immediately put off. A failure to liaise between the developers and the marketing team when changing URLs wastes valuable time and money. Slight slip-ups in how the migration is carried out could result in loss of organic traffic for core keywords for months instead of a disruption of just a couple of weeks.
Overall, you need to be sure you’ve considered what is changing to the site and that you’re prepared to deal with all of the external systems that will be affected. This isn’t necessarily a lot of work, but it is vital. As with everything to do with your migration, it really is best to plan it out in detail well in advance and don’t rush things.
One final point to consider, whatever you do to mitigate the impact of your migration, you should never carry one out at your peak times. If you see a huge surge in business in summer, don’t carry out a migration in August.
