Guide on How to Effectively Migrate Your Website Content to a New Platform

• A website migration involves in the relocation of one’s website content to a new site in order to improve its user experience, traffic, and search engine visibility.
• Though the process website migration looks simple, it tends to fail. The chances of losing your rankings is high, particularly when you begin making changes.
• By creating these guidelines, our interactive checklists contain all the essential steps during the pre-migration and before launching your new website.
• Some of these basic rules include careful planning and double testing.

The migration process of your old website to a new one is significantly not just about moving your content from one spot onto the next. Though migrating appears to be an easy task, the consideration of accuracy, efficiency, and the time investment is crucial. In addition, a website migration generally falls flat because of poor planning, an absence of awareness of the risks involved, and a lack of knowledge by the parties involved. To assist you in migrating your website efficiently, we have developed these high-level guidelines. Before we move forward, let us understand what exactly is a website migration in case you may be wondering.

Website Migration

A website migration is when a website goes through a considerable change that can influence your website’s user experience, search engine visibility and traffic. With regards to e-commerce, this often occurs when users switch from one platform to another. By working with an agency or SEO expert, you can keep these 3 components running effectively.

Things to Consider During Pre-Migration Stage

Source of Image: Unsplash.com by William Iven

Learn to Sit Back and Examine Your Current Website

Aside from your website design, content serves as one of the most essential tools you have in selling to visitors. Knowing what pages are getting the most traffic and which have the highest bounce rate is another aspect to consider. Taking a look at your pages with the least traffic can likewise help you figure out which pages you could easily scrap. Last but not least, it would be best if you can re-evaluate on your “About Us” to tell the right story to your audiences.

Priorities are Your Character – Set Them Right!

After you carefully explore your current website, you will have the option to set the needs for your new website content. If you plan to work together with an agency, they can help you assess your present content and any changes you are hoping to make, and consolidate best practices for the website. To give you an idea, pages that hardly get any traffic need should not be ignored. This can give you the ability to decide whether those pages are needed on your new site. You could also rework or even merged with another page.

Create a Sitemap for a Clearer Path

Once you have settled on your needs and explored your present site, you will need to work on a new sitemap for your new website. Agencies would usually help you with this part in the case that you hire them. As the backbone to your website, a sitemap should be simple. It is advisable to include a visual to help recognize which content should be combined, moved, removed, and added.

Decide What Needs to be Migrated

With your needs pinned down and sitemap ready, you can choose which pages and what content on those particular pages should be relocated. Concerning e-commerce websites, there is much more to consider. Alongside what pages you need to move, you have to think about the products and services you wish to move. Others include the order history, applications you use for payment methods, and so forth.

Things to Consider Before the Launch

Source of Image: Unsplash.com by Igor Miske

Create a Content Migration Plan

After establishing your framework, the next step is to start on your migration plan. This plan should also include decisions on who will be involved, how soon do you plan on relocating your content, and the date of your new website launch. Make sure to check the availability of your key team members, too.

Use Your Red Pen to Check for Duplicate Content

In the e-commerce world, the complexity and sheer number of products leave more room for errors. One common mistake we see originates from the way links are built based on filtering. Often times, various filters will show the same items but will show different URLs dependent on the order in which the filters were picked. In order to prevent duplicate content, canonical tags would be recommended. These tags take pages on your website that show similar content on numerous pages. It then show them under one “master” version of a URL. Remember, Google does not like duplicate content.

Review Your Meta Data

In case you are changing to a new platform, it is essential to ensure that your metadata is revised and refreshed based on your new sitemap. Your metadata incorporates page titles alongside title tags and descriptions.

Conduct Double-Test on New Website

After launching your website, it is vital to test your live website. Regardless of what you do before the launch day, there will undoubtedly be a few hiccups. Most agencies tend to rearrange their clients’ website content in a way that serves a purpose after doing a double-check.