Your SEO Strategy for Website Migrations: Checklists To Support SEO Before, During, and After Launch
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Site migrations are complex. Chances are if you’re in the digital marketing world, you’ve dealt with a website migration. Whether it’s a total site overhaul, a migration to a new CMS or server, or a domain name change, there are many reasons to migrate a website and many elements to consider before, during, and after launch. Without a careful SEO strategy in place throughout the process, you run the risk of losing the digital presence you’ve worked so hard to build.
When diving into a website migration, a general checklist is helpful to ensure your SEO strategy doesn’t miss a beat. Below is a comprehensive guide on SEO considerations for website migrations. We recommend working with SEO specialists in addition to following this guide to ensure your strategy is tailored to your situation specifically though!
Table Of Contents
Site Migration Considerations
First things first, you need a migration plan in place. What is the best time to launch a website migration? What is a realistic timeline for a website migration? What can you expect to happen following a site migration? The answers to these questions will be dependent on your unique situation, but there are some questions you can ask yourself to help you set some guardrails.
What are your website’s peak hours?
Are there certain days of the week or month that users are most active on your site? Make sure you aren’t pushing a migration through during these times, as there could be some downtime during the launch.
What can you expect to happen following a website migration?
It’s important to set realistic expectations for your website migration. It is normal to see fluctuations in traffic, keyword rankings, and other metrics immediately following the migration.
Once you have your plan and expectations in place, it’s time to get into SEO preparations.
Pre-Site Migration SEO Checklist
These are steps to take before you even start building the new website.
- Crawl and export your existing site.
- You can use a tool like Screaming Frog for this task. This tool offers valuable information like an inventory of all pages that need to be migrated, all existing metadata, schema markup, and any issues that should be resolved during the new build.
Note: Screaming Frog is a free tool, but it has limitations. After crawling 500 URLs, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid version, which is $259 per year.
- You can use a tool like Screaming Frog for this task. This tool offers valuable information like an inventory of all pages that need to be migrated, all existing metadata, schema markup, and any issues that should be resolved during the new build.
- Take inventory of analytics & tracking tags.
You’ll want to ensure accurate tracking and a seamless transition. Identify all your active tracking tags, and check if any unused tags can be removed.
- Compile core URLs and set benchmarks
Collect all URLs that obtained SEO value and compile them into a list. benchmark current keyword rankings, organic traffic, backlinks, and any other metrics used to measure success.
- Some questions you may want to ask while setting benchmarks:
- What are your most valuable pages?
You typically want to preserve all your pages, but these pages are especially important in maintaining your SEO presence and visibility.
What pages drive the most organic traffic?
What pages have earned quality backlinks?
What pages are ranking for the most relevant keywords?
How many keywords are ranking?
Where are your top keywords positioned in search results?
What is the average daily/weekly/monthly organic traffic to the site?
How much total site traffic is there from all channels?
What does the breakdown of mobile versus desktop traffic look like?
How does your site perform in terms of Core Web Vitals?
- What are your most valuable pages?
- Create an inventory of all your content.
This is already half-done if you completed the first step of crawling the site. You can check other sources like the Google Search Console Indexing Report for any outliers.
Another type of content you shouldn’t overlook is images. Where are your images currently hosted? It’s important to have a plan in place to ensure that your images remain accessible, especially if they’re hosted on your domain or within your CMS and those are changing.
- Clean up any floating issues.
This is another step that’s already partially complete. Your initial crawl should help identify any technical errors or website issues that can be addressed before migrating your site. Specifically, cleaning up 404 errors, other 4xx issues, and duplicate content will be beneficial before you start the migration process.
- Set up a staging environment.
You need an area to build your site in before it goes live. A development sandbox or staging site is where you can do this, but you want to make sure the staging site has a meta robots tag of “noindex,nofollow” and is blocked in robots.txt.
Website Migration SEO Checklist During The Design & Development Process
These are the technical SEO and on-page optimizations you want to consider throughout the build and development process.
- Determine the final URL structure and architecture.
- In most cases, it's advisable to keep URLs as similar as possible when migrating a website, though there can be exceptions. This is also the stage where you should decide on your canonical URL. Ensuring consistency is key, so establish self-referencing canonical tags for your chosen version.
Do you want your URLs to be www or non-www?
Are you going to have a trailing slash (/) at the end of your URLs?
What case usage are you going to use in your URLs? (Upper-case vs Lower-case)?
Are your URLs descriptive of your content? Are they easy to read? We recommend the use of dashes (-) rather than underscores (_) to separate words in a URL.
- In most cases, it's advisable to keep URLs as similar as possible when migrating a website, though there can be exceptions. This is also the stage where you should decide on your canonical URL. Ensuring consistency is key, so establish self-referencing canonical tags for your chosen version.
- Create your robots.txt file and XML sitemap.
Use these to direct search engine crawlers like Googlebot what to crawl and index, and make sure to use the canonical URLs you selected in the last step.
- Design with Core Web Vitals in mind.
Fixing Core Web Vitals can be time-consuming and take up a lot of resources, so it's better to build with them in mind from the start. You can run a Chrome DevTools' Lighthouse report in your staging environment to spot-check items like image sizing, utilizing next-gen formats for images (WebP), and issues with JavaScript. This won’t catch everything, and keep in mind Lighthouse uses controlled lab data, so be sure to check PageSpeed Insights for real-world performance once your site is live.
- Optimize for mobile usability and accessibility.
This is another step that could save you a headache down the road. We know that Google uses mobile-first indexing. Additionally, websites are legally required to be ADA-compliant. There are several guidelines to meet these requirements and a Lighthouse report will alert you to any accessibility issues, including mobile usability issues like content sizing and button spacing.
- Implement on-page content & SEO elements.
- Primary SEO elements to consider when migrating content:
Metadata, headings, and copy are properly optimized.
The copy contains internal links to related content.
The heading structure is hierarchical, featuring a primary H1 at the top to introduce the page topic, along with H2s and subsequent headings to organize subtopics or sections that support the main topic.
Image file names are optimized and include appropriate alt text.
- Primary SEO elements to consider when migrating content:
- Create a custom 404 page.
Even with thorough preparation, search engines or users can encounter a non-existent address. To avoid a dead end, create a custom 404 page that offers useful elements, such as links to primary pages and an internal search function. Engaging users who land on a 404 page can help redirect them to meaningful content.
- Set up analytics & tracking tags.
You won’t collect any data until your site is live, but you want to ensure your analytics tracking codes are installed correctly and that any goals you have are configured correctly for the new website.
- Map your URLs & redirects.
You’ve already taken inventory of your Core URL pages. Now it’s time to map the redirects to ensure that old pages are pointed to the most relevant new pages if your URL structure is changing. You’ll want to keep redirects in place for at least a year following the migration.
- Crawl the staging site.
You can use Screaming Frog for this step as well, even before the migration is live. This helps you identify any errors, redirect loops, crawl traps, missing metadata, or any other issues you want to resolve before going live.
- Create a backup of the current site…
…just to be safe.
Post-Site Migration SEO Checklist & Strategy
Once the site has gone live, these are the final steps to ensure everything is up and running without a hitch.
- Verify tracking & integrations.
Check that your analytics is accurately recording traffic, that Google Search Console is verified, and that all eCommerce, web forms, and other integrations are functioning properly.
- Check the robots.txt file and submit XML sitemaps.
Verify that the robots.txt file has been updated to allow indexing once you move the site from staging to live.
Additionally, submit XML sitemaps to tools like Google Search Console to help expedite the crawling of your new website.
- Crawl the live site.
This is our third and final crawl of the process. We want to ensure there are no 4xx or 5xx errors, missing content or metadata, crawl traps, or any other issues that users or search engines might encounter on your site.
- Check Google Search Console crawl statistics.
In Google Search Console, you can gain insights into how Google is crawling your site. It's important to ensure there aren’t significant drop-offs or errors on the crawler's end after the migration.
- Update links, listings, and ads.
This step is especially crucial if you’ve changed your domain name. Be sure to update the links in your ads, social profiles, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and any other listings you own.
If possible, request updates to any high-value backlinks pointing to your old domain.
- Monitor traffic, keyword rankings, and other benchmarks.
Some fluctuations are normal during any migration, but we want to ensure that things normalize without any immediate, drastic drop-offs. It’s also a good idea to annotate the migration date in your analytics for context in your reports.
- Celebrate!
You did it!
Insights from the Workshop Digital Team
We asked team members "What do you believe is often overlooked during brand site migrations?" Here is what they had to say:
“One important aspect I frequently observe is the failure to update analytics tracking during site migrations. During a site migration presents an opportunity for internal data purposes and ROI, as well as a chance to reassess the hurdles users face in the conversion process. This is a time to ask yourself, "Can we streamline this workflow?" If brands are investing in these changes and one of our primary goals is to enhance user experience, it’s vital to prioritize tracking. This allows us to demonstrate improvements by comparing data before and after the changes. While UX can be subjective, having clean data transforms it into an objective game.”
“CMS functionality - Sometimes companies choose an agency because they like the agency or the agency's work but they don't fully understand and vet the functionality of the platform the agency works in. While most CMS platforms can ultimately achieve the desired functionality, some come with additional costs, time, maintenance, and headaches!”
Keep SEO in Tact During a Website Migration
Website migrations can be daunting, but with the right SEO strategy in place, you can reduce some of the stress and ensure your ongoing marketing efforts are preserved throughout the launch. Don't forget to download our checklist.
Have a big migration or website redesign on the horizon? Workshop Digital can guide you through the process to help ensure your website retains SEO value. Get in touch with us today to find out how.
