Migrating a website can be a lot of work. There’s design, page mapping, licenses, agency management, and so much more all on the go at the same time. Often, SEO is the last thing on anyone’s mind and, as a result, a migration causes your organic rankings to crash and burn. All those years of rank building gone in one fell swoop.

To help make sure you keep your SEO rankings safe and secure in a migration, This Side Up has devised a simple list of things you should always flag with your web company prior to migration to ensure a painless transition.

Create a snapshot of the current website

Start by taking a snapshot of the legacy website using a tool like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl to export all of the historical website meta-information. This ensures that, if you encounter any issues with the migration, you have access to all of the historic information and can manually re-update the new pages with historical meta information. It's crucial you don’t strip all of the meta-data from the new website build as this can be extremely harmful to your organic position.

Monitor Analytics Performance

Depending on how the migration is being managed you can either continue using an old instance of Analytics or you might need to create a new Analytics profile for the website.

When setting up a new Analytics account, it’s important to benchmark the historical data so you can easily compare historical performance against your new website. Ensure any historic data is retained throughout the migration so you can monitor the performance of the new website and have a point of reference.

If you can operate out of an existing Analytics account, set a note or comment on the day of the migration so you can accurately measure performance and watch trends from the day of implementation.

Third-party services

New websites can be exciting but before you rush to launch, check that all third-party services are mapped and retained. The last thing you want to do is disconnect your tech stack and lose valuable data. All too often when a website migration occurs you will see conversion tracking instantly lost. This can lead to larger problems and incur additional costs when re-configuration is required.

Flag this with your developers and any third parties that have third-party code on the website (e.g. your digital marketing agency). You will save a lot of headaches by ensuring any tracking codes, install codes or customer scripts still work on the new website.

Some example of these services include:

Google Analytics or other analytics platforms
Google Tag Manager (please don't break any This Side Up conversion tracking!)
Google Search Console
CRM Tools (SharpSpring, Klaviyo, HubSpot, Salesforce etc).
CRO Tools (HotJar, OptinMonster)
Other Tools - Zapier, PieSync, or literally anything that can use header, body or footer scripts to execute a service

301 Redirects

Too many times we’ve seen website migrations completely tank organic performance. They say beauty lies within and, when it comes to SEO, this is most definitely correct. Just because something looks great externally does not mean it will out-perform old URLs or versions of the website.

An integral part of any website migration is to map, plan, and execute on a 301-redirection project. This is where you take the legacy website and the new website and look for any links that will be archived or the URL slug will be changed.

You can learn about the different HTTP statuses here, but a website migration that does not employ a 301 redirection plan is likely to fail. Search Engines such as Google will index pages from your website and through the algorithm, your pages are given ranking signals which dictate where you show up in Google. When you change websites, it can take up to 30 days for any changes to be updated in search engines.

So, let's say you have an old URL which is /blog and a new URL which is /news.

If you do not use a 301 redirect to connect the two pages, search engines will continue to index your old website pages for up to 30 days. This could result in people finding old links that lead to a 404-page and, if left unaddressed, any ranking signals the old /blog page had will be completely lost when it is un-indexed.

Ensure you check this with your website developers prior to going live and make sure all the old website URLs point somewhere on the new website where applicable. Failure to do so runs the risk of heavily damaging SEO performance.

Sitemaps & robots.txt

Make sure you have submitted the new website sitemap on a webmaster tool such as Google Search Console. This allows you to manually request a crawl and helps update search engines with information from your new website. When this isn’t done, it can take up to 3 months to completely erase any trace of your old website from Google.

It’s also important to ensure the robots.txt file is migrated and updated as necessary alongside the sitemap. Checking for small technical elements such as sitemap autodiscovery is also recommended.

It can also be a great move to make sure any historical sitemaps and robots.txt files have been saved.

Meta Information

As referenced by our first point, all active pages on the website need to have the following meta elements. Sometimes you will re-do meta before launching the new website, or sometimes you can simply migrate the old meta-data.

If this goes unnoted or undocumented you can tank organic rankings. One key thing to look out for are new pages that did not exist on the legacy website. Make sure any new pages are updated with all the main meta elements from the get-go.

Essential Meta Elements for SEO

Meta titles: Each page has a meta title ranging 50-60 characters
Meta descriptions: Each page had a meta description ranging 140-160 characters
H1 Headers: Try and utilise H1 headers on every page, using relevant keywords

Check your canonicals

It is always worth checking any canonicals on the new site references itself and not any legacy content. If set up incorrectly, it can damage the ability to index pages and cause a lot of confusion for search engines.

Canonicals effectively point to a final URL in the case of duplicate or parameter heavy URLs.

Check the technicalities

A quick and easy tool you can use to check over your website is web.dev, also known as Google Lighthouse. This is a free audit tool that will check for common elements like loading speeds, responsiveness and fundamental SEO errors that can be easily fixed.

Following a website migration, it’s worthwhile conducting an in-depth SEO audit to catch any problems early on. Failure to identify these problems could result in the loss of years of hard work.

Ensure your organic position is kept safe when building a new website. If you ever need a second pair of eyes This Side Up can sort you out with a technical SEO audit or assist with your website migration.