What Is an SEO Migration?
It’s one of those geeky website terms that gets thrown around like a hot potato but ends up meaning different things to different people. But no matter what your version of ‘migration’ is, it requires a great deal of planning and care to avoid breaking your website or messing up your rankings.
So when you hear the word ‘migration’ it could mean any of the following:
- You’re moving to another hosting company, server, or CMS, e.g., HubSpot to WordPress
- You’re changing your domain or rebranding your company, e.g., Geeky Tech to Ninja Tech
- You’re giving your site a major redesign and want to cull some old pages (not really a migration per se, but this info still applies)
- You’ve acquired another website and need to merge the two
- All or a combination of the above
Why a Migration Can Be Tricky
If you remember from our Understanding On-Page Optimisation post, you’ll know that your website is actually quite a technical entity. Don’t let those celebrity-studded Wix commercials fool you. The backend of a website is more like the cockpit of a spaceship than Karlie Kloss’s clean drag-and-drop web builder.
In this post, we want to explain how to prevent or mitigate any damage your migration might cause, but before we do, take a look at our pocket-sized jargon dictionary to help you follow along.
(While we’re big fans of self-learning and DIY, we wouldn’t go as far as to suggest that you take charge of your migration based on the information from this post. We don’t have the bandwidth to cover everything today…we also don’t want to put you to sleep.)
Jargon Dictionary
- Hosting: A service that makes your website accessible on the world wide web. This is the server where your website files are stored.
- Backlinks: Web links from other domains that send users to your site.
- Ranking URL: A web page that is indexed by Google and ranking within the top 100 search results for a specific query.
- Crawler: Also known as a spider, a crawler is an internet bot that scans your web pages for indexing purposes. Google has one that’s affectionately called Google Bot.
- CMS: (Content management system) an application that allows you to create, edit, and manage your website content from a dashboard or backend. The most well-known CMS is WordPress.
- Third-Party Scripts: A script integrated into your website from an outside party that gives your site more functionality. Google Analytics scripts are an easily understood version of this.
- Status Code: A response from a server when you request a web page (click on a link). There are much more than what is listed below, these are the most common ones.
- 0: No connection - something went wrong
- 200: Good — no action necessary
- 301: Page moved permanently
- 302: Page temporarily moved
- 403: Forbidden request: Requested page may well be password protected or something similar
- 404: Page cannot be found (this is what we don’t want after a migration)
- 429: Too many requests - if you crawled your own website using a tool such as Screaming Frog and the server couldn’t cope with all the requests
- 500: Server error (contact your hosting provider if it persists)
Your Migration Plan: An Exercise in Self-Preservation
If you’ve put months or years of hard work into your SEO, you don’t want to lose it all with a lazy or ill-prepared migration. Before you transfer your site, it’s important to follow an SEO migration plan. Otherwise, all the hard work you’ve put into your rankings could vanish (cue gasp).
Have we frightened you enough now? Good—we’re sorry, but it had to be done.
Now, let’s move on.
Before Your Move: Your Pre-Migration SEO List
First things first: open a fresh spreadsheet.
We’re going to make a list of all the URLs you want to protect to make sure they don’t deliver a 404 or get lost during the migration.
Here are the steps for gathering your URLs:
URLs That Received Traffic From Google Search
Enter your Google Search Console account and make sure you’ve picked the correct property, or, if you’re using a domain property, filter out any other subdomains that won’t be migrated. Then:
- Click Performance on the left-hand menu.
- Go to the Pages tab in the exported sheet and copy those URLs into your migration document.
- Filter results from the last 12 months (or as much data as you like) and export it to a Google sheet.
Then:
- Run this list of URLs in a crawler such as Screaming Frog and remove any that aren’t live (not delivering a 200 status code). If you see 404s then please investigate 🙂
Remember Third-Party Scripts
If you’re doing a major redesign, this step isn’t necessary.
If you’re moving your CMS or domain, all third-party scripts (e.g. your Google Analytics tracking script) need to be located and documented (perhaps in a different tab).
You should now have a list of all the performing URLs and tracking scripts on your website. This is what we call the golden list. In the immortal words of Gandalf the Grey, ‘Keep it secret. Keep it safe.”
Communicate!
If this is your personal website then just go ahead. But if not, please consider everyone else involved and communicate with them. They may want to have input or just want to be kept in the loop.
If you require help from developers or other third parties in order to go-live,, don’t wait until a Friday afternoon. Do it when the people who support you are available and ideally not when you receive most of your traffic.
Go Forth and Migrate
Now, it’s time to carefully migrate your site. You don’t need your golden list just yet, but you will soon.
We don’t think Fridays are the best migration days. And if you don’t want to spend your weekend monitoring your progress or fixing problems, we suggest you avoid Fridays too.
Mondays are good migration days.
Post-Migration Steps
Follow these steps as soon as your site goes live:
Add Your Third-Party Scripts
Make sure anything you documented as a third-party script is added back into your new site (exactly where you found it on the old site, if possible!). This will mean that your analytics data (for example) won’t have big gaps in it.
If you’ve changed domains, tell Google! You can do this in Google Search Console under Settings > Change of Address. Just follow the easy-to-follow steps.
Review All Your URLs
Ideally, you’d use a crawler, but if you don’t have access, then click on every URL you documented on your list. Some URLS, like your homepage, will most likely still exist in the same place (unless you changed your domain, of course).
If the URL delivers a 404 (Page Not Found) then you need to redirect it to a relevant page. If your old Contact Us page was www.customersite.com/contact/ and the new one is www.customersite.com/contact-us/, then you need to redirect ‘/contact/’ to ‘/contact-us/’.
Any change to a URL means it is no longer the same and won’t be recognised, even if the change is slight—you need to tell computers EXACTLY where to find your content.
If the page delivers a 404 but there isn’t a clear alternative, redirect it to the homepage or a top-level page like your blog if the old URL was a blog post.
If you’re doing this for a large site then you should probably work out where you want to redirect your URLs ahead of time; this is referred to as URL mapping.
If You’ve Changed Your Domain
You’ll still need to keep hosting your old domain since that’s where your redirects live. Hold onto your domain for another full year—there’s no need to keep hosting two sites forever.
The End Result
Finally, make sure to submit a new sitemap to Google Search Console once the new site is live.
And presto! This whole process should mean that all your previous ranking URLs will now take users to a new page and nobody is left with a broken link. That, my friends, is what we call a successful migration.
A small reminder: it’s normal to see a small decline in rankings and traffic, but hopefully no more than 10%, and not for too long!
Frequently Asked Questions About Migration
We get asked this question quite a lot, and the short answer is yes, it will. All of your rankings are associated with your domain and therefore any change (such as your domain no longer existing) will, of course, have an effect.
Hopefully, you’ll have a lot of links attached to your old domain, so you’re going to want to transfer these for SEO purposes. To do this, you’ll have to keep your old domain under your control (as in, keep paying for hosting) and redirect the links to your new domain. It’s pretty easy, actually (we exclaim geekily).
For more on this, skip ahead to the post-migration steps.
Yes this is avoidable, you’ll need to make sure that redirects are in place so that search engines and users don’t get lost. As long as you haven’t removed the important keywords from your URL, you shouldn’t see any major movement in your rankings.
Beware of major content changes to high-ranking pages. By making changes to your content, you could be removing vital keywords or valuable internal links that are giving you your rankings. What you remove and also what you add in will have an effect. Alternatively, it can also boost your results too if you’re improving the content!
The simple answer is no.
However, the main criteria for hosting will be the location and the speed of the server. If these things improve when you move hosting providers, then your rankings could see an improvement, too. Of course, if you move to a more affordable option, you could see a decline.
