How to Successfully Manage a Website Migration

There are several reasons why businesses migrate their websites. One common sense is that their business goals change, and they must reflect these changes on their website.

Setting up measurable objectives during the planning phase of web migration is essential. It will help in making sure that the process runs smoothly.

Identifying the key stakeholders

Identifying the key stakeholders for your web migration is essential early on. It helps manage their expectations and ensure they feel involved throughout the process. It will make them more likely to support and help the project succeed. It’s also an opportunity to understand their roles and responsibilities and what is required from them.

Stakeholders can be divided into several categories, such as those responsible for the migration’s technical aspects and those focused on business outcomes. It’s essential to involve them in the planning process and have regular meetings with them to discuss the project’s progress. This will also help them set clear goals that can be measured and evaluated at the end of the migration.

Any website migration is a significant undertaking with many moving parts. Having a clear plan and sufficient resources is vital to complete the job. It will solve any issues promptly without jeopardising the project’s overall success.

A successful web migration depends on several factors, including content, design, and usability. One area often overlooked is SEO, which can significantly impact a site’s performance. It’s, therefore, critical to include SEO experts in the migration planning and testing stages.

During the migration process, it’s essential to keep a close eye on all the key metrics that impact SEO, such as pages crawled, indexable URLs, and site speed. Any significant deviations from these benchmarks could indicate that the migration has gone wrong or isn’t performing as expected. An excellent way to keep track of these metrics is by using a tool designed with web migration in mind, such as ContentKing.

Establishing measurable objectives

There are numerous benefits to establishing measurable objectives at the beginning of a site migration, but managing expectations is essential. The primary aim should always be to retain current traffic levels, but forecasting or even anticipating growth should be on the table sometimes.

This is where an experienced SEO consultant should step in and help establish clear goals based on the project scope, the existing data available (such as traffic, ranking history, revenue, etc.), and the expected timeframe for completing the migration. Measurable metrics allow you to identify any problems or issues that may arise quickly.

For example, if the migration includes changing from HTTP to HTTPS, one of the most crucial things is to have a complete overview of all pages affected by this change. This includes everything from the homepage to product category pages and detail pages. All these pages must be redirected to the new, functioning version of the page, as it’s otherwise possible that visitors who follow external links will encounter a 404 error and be discouraged from visiting your website in the future.

This is why it’s essential to have an SEO expert on board as early as possible. They can help you define the project’s goals and ensure the migration is completed with minimal impact on your overall visibility. This includes limiting new content launches while the migration is in progress and avoiding publishing new pages until the migration is completed. All of this can significantly impact your overall visibility, and it’s best to be proactive rather than reactive.

Creating a project plan

The first step in any web migration is to build a team with the necessary knowledge and expertise to manage the process. It includes system administrators, web developers, designers, SEOs, and others impacted by the migration. The team should meet early on to define measurable objectives for the project. Always remember that any website migration will result in a traffic drop, which should be considered when setting the project’s aim.

Creating a separate staging environment for the new website is also good. It will allow you to test the migration without impacting the live site. It’s a great way to identify any errors that might not be apparent on the live site, and it will give you a chance to fix them before they cause problems on the new website. Then, once you’ve done some pre-migration testing, it’s time to start the actual migration.