Things To Think About When Migrating A Website in 2023

A website migration is any significant change to the website that impacts its performance and search engine visibility. The change can be as big as changing your domain to as small as transitioning your URL from HTTP to HTTPS. Website migration is carried out to change the structure, platform, design, content, design and location of the website.

There are various web designing companies in Dubai but only the professional ones excel in providing the best solutions to the website related issues. While migration isn’t a complex procedure, it requires the right skills to migrate your website effectively. We have discussed below the various factors that you must consider when migrating a website. Let’s have a look.

Things to Consider When Migrating a Website

1. CREATE A CLEAR MIGRATION OBJECTIVE

Before starting the migration, you must make sure you know the primary goals and objectives of your migration. Why exactly do you wish to undergo migration and how it might impact the performance of your website? Migration isn’t always related to SEO, it can be as simple as redesigning. Create an effective plan by knowing what exactly you are looking for and then go ahead with migration. 

2. ASSIGN TASKS TO ALL THE STAKEHOLDERS

A website migration is not a one person task, it requires the skills and expertise of the entire digital marketing team. You must assign the stakeholders their tasks as soon as possible so as to ensure the migration goes as planned. The different stakeholders involved are usually: web developers, SEO specialists, UX designers, content writers, marketing teams and more. 

3. GET AN OVERVIEW OF THE OLD SITE

Before migration, you must crawl your old site and get an overview of the current performance of your website so that you can evaluate the impact of migration later on. You must also check for the present issues with your site and try to fix them while migrating to optimize the site performance. Monitor the site’s current SEO ranking, speed, traffic and other metrics for post-migration evaluation.

4. SET UP A TEST ENVIRONMENT

After you are done crawling your old website, you must have an overview about the top-performing pages. You must focus on improving the performance of the rest of the pages that are performing poorly. Set up a test environment on the new CMS and launch the full site on it. Make sure that the new site is registered on the Google Search Console once the domain is live.  

5. DECIDE A MIGRATION DEADLINE

Migration like any other task must have a defined deadline and must be finished as soon as possible. You must provide a landing page that says something like “coming soon” and temporarily block access to the new site while migration. The website will be down during the migration, that is why it must be scheduled either during off-hours or during a low season of lower traffic to avoid losing on your site traffic. 

6. MAKE A CONTENT INVENTORY

You must make sure to create a content inventory of the existing content which must include the documents, media files, pages. You must create backup copies of all these files to identify if any content gets lost after the migration process is complete. In case any issue arises, you can easily upload the missing files from the backup that you created. 

7. GET AN OVERVIEW OF SITE’S BACKLINK PROFILE

The website migration process often ends up changing the entire structure of the website. The backlinks will end up pointing to an old URL that will show the users error 404. You must update the DNS settings to the new IP address and ensure to rewrite the site’s backlink profile. You must be able to redirect the traffic to the new, functioning URL from the old URL that no longer exists. 

8. VERIFY INTERNAL AND CANONICAL LINKS

During migration, make sure that the internal links are verified and ensure that the broken links are identified and corrected during the process. Along with internal links, you must update the canonical links to ensure it does not disrupt your SEO ranking. You must ensure to flag your new website pages as canonical to prevent Google from ranking an outdated and old version of the content. 

9. AUDIT YOUR NEW SITE

Once the migration process is complete and the new website is live, then audit the new site for any possible errors that might affect the performance of the site. You must check for broken links, duplicate URLs, missing meta tags and other SEO related errors that might lower your search engine ranking. Recognise the issues and resolve them to improve the visibility of your website.

10. CONFIGURE YOUR ANALYTICAL TAGS

After the migration, make sure that all the analytical tags, scripts and codes are configured properly on all the pages that you have to monitor for the website’s performance. It is vital to configure the analytical tags for the better functioning of analytical tools. Without the analytical tags, the analytical tools will be unable to track and analyze the performance of the new site.

11. SUBMIT YOUR NEW XML SITEMAP

The XML sitemap is an important file that lists all the available essential pages of your website. It helps Google to crawl and find the pages of your website so that Google can index all the available URLs on your site. Once you are finished with the migration of your website, you must upload the XML sitemap of your new site to Google Search Console to make sure Google indexes your URLs properly.

12. UPDATE THE EXTERNAL LINKS 

The external links drive traffic to your website and have a greater impact on the search engine ranking of the website. You must get in touch with your partners and influencers who have created external links to your site and inform them to update the external links so as to ensure proper flow of traffic into your new website. They must immediately update the external links that they are using for your website.

13. ANALYZE WEB ANALYTICS DATA FOR NEW SITE

The final step in the migration process is to analyze the performance of your new website. Your new website’s web analytics data must be analyzed as compared to that of the old site. Check the ranking, performance, site traffic, speed of the newly migrated website. In case you are not satisfied by the metrics of your new website, you can find any further issues with the website and work on improving the performance of your website!

LAMP MEDIA TECH: THE BEST DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY 

Lamp Media Tech is the leading web development company in Dubai with more than 12+ years of experience in website migration. We have been offering the highest quality services to improve the visibility and performance of websites. Our team is focused on providing the best solutions to migrating your website and making it more effective for SEO.

If you wish to make your website undergo migration of any kind, then do consider getting in touch with our team. We will provide the best tools and automated checks to ensure a successful migration for your website!