Migrating your site is a complicated process. If you want to migrate your site, you need to have a profound reason behind it. As the technology evolves, Companies expand, and market strategy improvisation happens. It is inexorable at some point on the corporate ladder. You are going to face the challenge of revamping your website and site migration. To get it right, you need to have a clear and crisp strategy, Synergetic expert team support, and a dedicated amount of time.

However, it can be extremely daunting to migrate the website because there is the highest probability of experiencing a dip in the search ranking and site traffic. But it’s a temporary phase. Remember, every cloud has a silver lining. If you look at the brighter side and dive deeper, you realize Site migration will provide you plethora of advantages. Let’ say you want to merge the sub-domain with the main domain of your brand. At the primary stage, you might address heavy traffic and boost your search engine ranking. Because now customers are easy to find your content as you have migrated the domains owned by the same brand. And another essential aspect is that you do not need to manage your domains differently.

Site migration is of various types includes site location changes, platform changes, Content Changes, structural changes, and Design & UX changes. It depends on you what changes you need in your business. In case you want to do a successful migration, first, you have to create a strategic migration plan that helps you accomplish successful migration within the defined timeline.

Just-in-case you are confused and don’t want to do headhunting, consider Hostbegin Site Migration Checklist.

1. Outweigh the risk and prepare the roadmap

When you plan to migrate your website, you need to consider all the risks involved in the migration process and should prepare a roadmap in which you will be ready for catastrophe situations. Migration of a website is not a simple and easy process. You require a lot of preparations before deep-diving into the migration process. It includes the decline in SEO ranks, crucial data loss, and alternative data backup plans. You should address the list of things that go wrong before going to the migration of the website. Your system administrator must be prepared with an alternate plan if things do not go as per the original plan.

2. Data backup Strategy

Backup of data is the most crucial pivotal factor in the site migration process. If anything does not go as per your roadmap, you might lose your precious data. Therefore, a Data backup strategy will be an essential protocol for your site migration. You can upload the data on google drive or make a local copy of your data. In case anything will go wrong due to a manual or technical snag. This data backup helps you to restore your website to the original format. Therefore, you can’t take the risk of not having the backup data strategy.

3. Metrics to track the migration process

Before migrating to the new website, you will have to track the website migration process using migration metrics. There are various tools to track the website migration progress include website crawlers, site monitoring tools, etc. You have to make a list of things and compare the rankings, indexed pages, backlinks, and organic search traffic against your old domains.

4. Eliminate Broken Links and Errors

You have to look upon all the bugs and flaws present in your old website before the migration process. You have to keenly scan the earlier website to find out the bugs and broken links. Migrating your existing site with existing errors and broken links doesn’t give a successful site migration. You should ensure that all the technical issues need to be identified and removed from your earlier website.

5. Set up Robot exclusion protocol

Robot exclusion protocol or standard is also known as Robots.Txt file. In the website migration process, to host a new site with the existing URL, the robot.txt file might not change. Therefore, you have to ensure to set up the robot.txt file. If your robot.txt file remains the same, then it will block the redirects. It is the essential technical aspect of the site migration. To achieve the optimal results, you have to update the robot.txt file in the case of a new URL.

6. Promote your new site’s location

 

Your customers are associated with your old website location. Now, you can’t reach your customers with your old URL address. You have to amplify your voice and start promoting your new website on Social media handles. So that your elite customers acknowledge your site, without doing head-scratching, you will get back your existing customers for your online business. Your pre-launch promotion should be extensively powerful so that you can convey the correct information at the right time. Your pre-launch promotions help you a lot in increasing your new site search ranking. Because you already have your existing customers on your new site with your excellent promotions.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You have successfully migrated your website. After that, monitoring the website is the most crucial stage. All the efforts become viable if your site performance is satisfactory. The wrong site migration spoils your brands’ reputation. Website Migrations seems easy at the surface. But it is a very complicated process. Hostbegin Checklist helps you for successful site Migration.