Thinking about website migration? Want to bring your website to a different hosting service provider for reliable, secure hosting? If that’s the case, this blog is a must-read for you before beginning the process.
Imagine a brick-and-mortar shop that moves to a new location in the same area. They hope to win more clients but also risk losing the old ones. The same thing happens when you switch a website to another host/server; we call this concept “link equity” or “link juice” in simple terms.
When website migration is done right (under professional supervision), it leads to better SERP rankings, user experience, search visibility, and cybersecurity measures. However, bad migrations have downsides, such as a temporary drop in organic traffic and plunging SEO results. That is why you need this checklist to do website migration the right way.
Follow this 10-step process to understand how to migrate your web host successfully in 2024.
Site Migration Checklist: 10 Key Steps
Many websites have increased their organic traffic by switching servers. A notable example is Moz.com, migrating in 2018. This transition helped Moz improve site performance by streamlining the way they had organized their content. Similarly, Red Hat transitioned to a new Drupal platform when it consolidated a whopping collection of 50+ regionally targeted sites under a unified webpage. It maintained its visibility on SERPs with a 107% increase in English-language search queries.
You can achieve these results, too, with this ultimate website migration checklist:
1. Determining the end goals of this migration
Every successful website migration project starts by reviewing the goals & objectives. Why do you wish to transition to another provider? What upgrades do you hope to see after migrating your site to a new host? Some long-term objectives behind website switching are as follows:
- Making the website load faster
- Moving to a more feature-rich platform
- Gaining more control over content management
- Consolidating link equity and removing duplicate content
- Getting stronger firewalls, tech support, and SSL certificates
Once you realize what you want, you can initiate the site migration process. It’ll help you evaluate your success after the site has been migrated by checking whether you’ve achieved your goals or not.
2. Test your website’s performance
Next, you’ll have to check how your website’s current SEO performance. You should analyze:
- User data: Page views, bounce rate, session duration, traffic sources, etc.
- Keyword rankings: Use Semrush or Ahrefs to check current keyword positions
- Site speed: Use Pingdom to check your site’s loading speed and find out what’s slowing it down
Use these results to compare the site’s performance after site migration. If you noticed a rise in traffic or search rankings, it means that your website migration project was a success.
3. Set up the new web environment
You will then set up a staging environment to develop your new site and test it without affecting the live version. It’s a great way to experiment with different techniques to improve the functionality of the site and its performance. This staging environment will serve as a “safe space,” preventing public access and ensuring that search engines don’t accidentally index the unfinished site.
You don’t want SERP bots crawling your under-maintenance site right now! Imagine if content like Lorem ipsum gets indexed or Google shows server errors after accessing your development site. Keep in mind that once Google knows, it knows; it’s difficult to make bots forget your development site after it’s been crawled. So, you should prevent bots from accessing the site from the beginning.
4. Transfer the contents of your old site
Don’t forget to back up your site data, either! You can do it in two ways:
- Full Backup: Your entire site should have a backup, even the HTML files. It’s a safety check if the migration process gets derailed due to unforeseen circumstances.
- Backup plugins: WordPress or other CMSs have plugins that you have to use to back up all the data on your website automatically. It’ll simplify the backup process for you.
Also, you will create a redirect strategy that connects existing pages with their refurbished alternatives. It will make sure that search engines take users to the correct pages on the migrated site.
5. Perform quality assurance checks
Migrated your website already? Want to launch it? Don’t be hasty; first, you should conduct QA (quality assurance) to make sure it’s functioning the way you imagined. The QA process checks your site to see if it’s as user-friendly and easy to navigate as you intended.
You will also fix broken links or corrupted images in this process (which happens quite often when you switch hosts/servers). That’s how you can ascertain that the migrated site meets the desired goals (the ones we determined in the 1st step). After this final check is done and your QA team gives you the go-ahead, you will launch the new website.
6. Improve crawling and indexing
However, you still have to ensure that your migrated website is accessible to search engine bots. After you’ve moved the content and implemented redirects, the next step is to configure the robots.txt files. These files prevent overloading by telling crawlers which URLs on your site are accessible to them.
Search engine bots easily crawl the pages/directors permitted by robots.txt files. As we explained above, you’ll block the development site from being crawled by search engine bots. That’s because a site under construction shouldn’t be accessible to web crawlers.
However, you will have to review and update the site’s robots.txt files after the migration process is completed. Moreover, you’ll create an XML sitemap to list all the pages currently available on your post-migration website. This sitemap will showcase information regarding the site’s metadata as well as last modified dates and page priority lists.
Sitemaps make it easier for search engines to access all the pages available on your site. So, you should prioritize creating an XML sitemap and then submit it to search engines. This process will help Google or another search engine to discover your migrated website’s pages faster.
Now, this part is particularly important after a migration since search engines need time to re-crawl and re-index your website. You’ll make their task easier for them with an XML site map.
7. Check for page speed
Next, you’ll make sure that your site’s response time has improved. You should check for page speed as well as optimize it with image compression. It’s a no-brainer that large image sizes can make a webpage bulkier and can load on a user’s screen very slowly. In fact, bulky images are a major reason why many users abandon site visits. You can reduce the image size with these techniques:
- You should choose the right format when uploading images (PNG works best for graphics, while a JPEG is ideal for photographs).
- Implement responsive images that offer users the appropriate size based on the device that they are using.
- Use image compression tools to decrease file size without ruining the visual quality of a picture.
As the site owner, you should keep checking the site’s loading speed with tools like GTmetric. It’s a very crucial post-migration check that helps you understand why your website’s bounce rate is so bad. You’ll discover new insights into site speed with these recommendations as well.
8. Monitor site traffic and SEO performance
You may wonder if hosting changes have any effect on your SERP rankings. Experts opine that switching hosts will not affect your site’s indexing per se; however, the migrated website can cause over-requests within the new server. So, you should first check the health of the server manually by using spider tools.
That’s because you need to monitor organic and non-organic traffic to your website after migrating. It’ll reveal the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. You will learn which keywords your migrated site ranks for on SERPs and where most of your visitors are coming from! You can check the user behavior and assess the engagement metrics of your site post-migration to ensure that it’s working fine.
But traffic monitoring isn’t everything! You should also consider mapping customer journeys to optimize your website par excellence. Find out how users navigate through your website and see if you can easily identify key touchpoints to better understand their interactions with your content.
Keep assessing these user engagement metrics so you can update your SEO strategy, content marketing campaigns, etc., accordingly.
9. Test user experience
After migrating your website, you should thoroughly review your site’s user experience to check for usability issues that may have arisen while you were switching hosts. It simply means that you will navigate through the migrated site just like a typical user would; you will check for the following:
- Intuitive navigation
- Clear calls to action (CTAs)
- Overall website functionality
Don’t forget to reduce the frequency of 404 errors; these errors will arise when a user tries to access an important webpage that doesn’t exist. These errors worsen your site’s bounce rate and hurt the website organically. So, you should rely on 301 redirects to reduce 404 errors and make sure that old URLs take a user to the newly migrated alternative.
Now, this method doesn’t just keep your users happy. It’s also a great way to preserve the link juice (the SEO value) of your URLs since 301 redirects help you transfer link equity (we mentioned it in the intro) to the new URLs. Now, your new site’s SERP analysis is complete!
10. Validate migration success
Lastly, you will have to validate the successful conclusion of the site migration process!
In simple words, you’ll review your website to see that everything has been transferred successfully and works just fine. We did a brief overview of the SEO part of this analysis in the 9th step. You have to see to that all the necessary SEO elements have been implemented. In short, you should verify that:
- Redirects are working as intended.
- Meta tags and descriptions are accurate.
- XML sitemaps have been submitted to search engines.
After that, you should make sure that analytics tracking also functions the way it’s supposed to. Your site’s necessary tracking codes must be in place, and data must be collected and reported like before. Review the unique configurations or customizations that were on your old site as well. You must verify that they have been migrated to the new website successfully, such as the following:
- User databases
- Themes and templates
- Browser plugins or extensions
- Functionalities (forms, eCommerce, membership systems, etc.)
After validating all these key areas, you can say with confidence that your site has completed the migration process. Now, this website is ready to deliver an optimal experience to your old users, capable of attracting new ones, too, so you can achieve your business goals successfully.
Conclusion
This ultimate checklist will help you transition your website to another host/server without risking some of the common drawbacks of site migration. From determining the goals of site migration and testing its current performance to monitoring post-transition SERP rankings and validating the results of the whole process – this checklist covers everything you need to embark on a site migration journey.
If you are still confused, feel free to get in touch with the pros at QuickMigrate, who have years of experience helping site owners switch hosts smoothly. Contact website migration experts with their web dev skills to boost your site’s visibility and elevate it to new heights in SERP ranking.