Steps to prepare for a website migration

What is a website migration?

According to HubSpot, “a site migration describes the process by which a website gets largely revamped in areas that impact visibility on search engines. Generally, these areas are design, user experience, platform, site location, and structure.”

Why do you need a migration? 

Overtime, websites tend to grow in size and complexity, which is generally when a website migration becomes necessary. A website migration redirects all of your old web pages to new pages to reduce any negative impact on your rankings caused by moving or changing your site.

Website migration checklist

By following a step-by-step approach to migrating your site, you’ll set yourself up for a smoother process that will help avoid a negative SEO impact.

1. Define the migration objectives and document a list of deliverables

What is the migration supposed to accomplish? Can you go as far as writing a hypothesis? For example, moving your blog from the “blog.site.com” subdomain to the “site.com/blog/” subdirectory will result in 10% more organic traffic. This gives you a concrete metric to track in order to evaluate whether the migration was a success. 

2. Speak to stakeholders early in the process

Website migration typically involves everyone in the digital marketing team, meaning every department will want to make suggestions about its execution. Get key stakeholders involved early in the process and you’ll stand a better chance of getting their buy in on the upcoming changes. Nobody likes last-minute surprises!  

Informing each department early on will also make an opportunity for them to predict any potential implementation challenges, so the migration can go as smoothly as possible. 

3. Record your benchmarks

Before your website migration, you’ll need to have an overview of your current site’s performance. This will allow you to carefully evaluate what impact the migration has had.

You should also set aside some time to review your analytics and get a grasp on how visitors currently navigate your site and which pages are the most valuable. This context can help inform your redesign and site architecture decisions.

4. Set a deadline

Site migrations can be extensive, but you still want them to be executed as quickly as possible. Some tips:

• Avoid publishing new content or launching new pages during the migration.
• Schedule any migrations during off-hours or low traffic times, as to lower the impact on your visitors.

5. Create a content inventory 

You don’t want anything getting lost, so be sure to take full stock of your existing site and create backup copies, if possible. 

6. Map your URLs 

As mentioned, site migrations often change the entire structure of your site. If you're making major changes to the URLs on your site, you'll need redirections in place to guide Google and your website users from your old URLs to your new URLs. 

7. Update canonical links

It’s possible that during a migration, you may end up with multiple versions of the same page, which means Google and other search engines will find it more difficult to decide which of the pages to rank. And you don’t want outdated pages showing up on search engines instead of the one you intended. 

To avoid this happening, put canonical links in place where needed, so you can signal to Google which of your pages with similar content you consider to be the main version. Don’t forget to flag all of your new, post-migration pages as canonical as well—to avoid losing your SEO standing. 

8. Update your robots.txt file

A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. If it’s not configured properly, you could unintentionally make entire sections of your website invisible to search engines, and worst still, potential visitors! 

9. Crawl the new site

Once the new site is live, you can do a crawl to see if the migration has gone to plan, and quickly identify whether you’re seeing an increase in the number of broken links or error response codes. One thing you want to look for is proper indexability and crawlability. 

10. Check your analytics tags

Without HTML tags, web analytics tools cannot track and report on page visits. Following the migration, double check that you have analytics tags on all the pages you intend to monitor. 

11. Revisit your benchmark metrics

Remember the metrics you collected during step 3? Well now it’s time to analyze the web analytics data for your new site to see how it compares. 

Where does it normally go wrong?

Thinking of migrating your website to HubSpot but don't know where to start? The process of shifting to HubSpot doesn’t need to be time consuming, costly, or a painful loss of valuable data. If your existing software application or website has an open API—we can update your systems and get you HubSpot integrated in no time! 

Speak to one of our specialists today.