This document provides guidance on how to successfully conduct a website migration without negatively impacting traffic, rankings, and revenue. It emphasizes the importance of pre-migration planning, actions, and post-migration checks. Key steps include defining responsibilities and resources, creating a project plan and checklist, setting up redirects, internal link updates, and benchmarking rankings. Post-migration, the document recommends checking robots.txt, redirects, log files, and conducting various tests through Google Search Console to identify any issues.

1. SteveChambers
/5tevee
HownottoF**Kup aMigration.

2. A quick intro…
STEVE CHAMBERS
SEO Manager @ Stickyeyes

3. What I’ll Be Covering
➢ Migration Goals.
➢ Pre-Migration Planning.
➢ Pre-Migration Actions.
➢ Post-Migration Checks.
➢ Measuring Performance.

4. Migration Goal

5. Not just maintain traffic, rankings &
revenue
but IMPROVE them.

6. A successful migration.
Our philosophy on delivering a successful migration can be broken down into two distinct parts:
DEFENSIVE
Protecting the rankings and visibility you already have:
• IA compatibility
• Redirect management
• Crawling & accessibility
• Relevancy transition
OFFENSIVE
Forging new opportunities via an improved technical
environment:
• Improved IA for added relevancy
• Enhanced authority management
• Content & depth enhancements
• Best in class category / product pages
• Correcting the basics

7. Good Migration Example
Clean swap between the visibility of the old site and new, rankings
were maintained
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
Visibility
Good Site Migration
Old Site New Site

8. Poor Migration Example
A poor example of a migration, some rankings were maintained but the website has lost a
significant amount of visibility.
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
Visibility
Poor Migration Example
Old Site New Site

9. Pre-Migration
Planning

10. Planning for a migration can be broken down into
four key areas…
RESPONSIBILITIES
Get everyone into a room and
discuss who’s responsible for
what factor of the migration,
ensure everyone knows what
they’re supposed to do and
when.
RESOURCE
It’s crucial to ensure you
have the correct resource
available at various stages
during a migration. Don’t let
the team go on holiday on
migration day!
PROJECT PLANNING
Will you be using any project
planning software such as
Jira/Trello to manage the day to
day workflow of the migration?
CHECKLIST
This needs to be defined as
early as possible and tailored
to each individual project.
Each migration comes with
its own unique issues and
challenges.

11. Responsibilities
➢ Involve as many stakeholders as possible.
➢ UX / Design.
➢ Analytics.
➢ SEO.
➢ Product.
➢ Paid.
➢ Dev.
➢ Define who is responsible for each element.
DON’T WORK IN SILO!

12. Resource
NO HOLIDAYS! (SORRY)
➢ Estimate time and effort required
➢ Ensure budget is allocated to resource
➢ Include a buffer for additional resource
➢ Check availability of the migration team.

13. Project Planning
CRUCIAL FOR A SMOOTH MIGRATION!
➢ Determine the plan as early as possible.
➢ Share the plan with all stakeholders.
➢ Ensure it’s clear concise.
➢ Include responsibilities.
➢ Utilize project management software.
➢ Consistently keep track of progress.

14. Migration Checklist
DETERMINE WHAT NEEDS CHECKING
➢ Often varies per project.
➢ Break into key phases.
➢ Include technical and on page factors.
➢ Don’t forget to include 3rd party elements.
➢ Ensure responsibilities are defined.

15. Pro-tip #1
DON’T DO IT ON A FRIDAY!

16. Pre-Migration
Actions

17. Information Architecture
One of the first stages of a new site build is mapping out the IA – SEO needs to be involved in this process.

18. Wireframes
Often overlooked – input into wireframe designs to determine key on page factors is crucial from the onset.

19. Staging Access
Probably one of the most important factors is getting staging site access.
Remember – Staging sites need to be inaccessible to
search engines!
➢ Robots.txt
➢ NoIndex
➢ Password Protect
➢ IP Restricted Access

20. Gathering URLs
To ensure a smooth migration, we need to capture as many URLs as possible to map to the new site structure.

21. Gathering URLs
Get access to your server log files to discover even more URLs including
those that bot’s crawl the most.

22. Redirect Mapping
Likely the most crucial part of any migration is ensuring that all URLs are
correctly mapped to their new counterpart.
Old URL Redirect Type New URL
example.com/old-url-1 301 example.com/new-url-1
example.com/old-url-2 301 example.com/new-url-2
example.com/old-url-3 301 example.com/new-url-3
example.com/old-url-4 301 example.com/new-url-4
example.com/old-url-5 301 example.com/new-url-5
example.com/old-url-6 301 example.com/new-url-6
example.com/old-url-7 301 example.com/new-url-7
example.com/old-url-8 301 example.com/new-url-8
example.com/old-url-9 301 example.com/new-url-9
example.com/old-url-10 301 example.com/new-url-10
example.com/old-url-11 301 example.com/new-url-11
example.com/old-url-12 301 example.com/new-url-12
example.com/old-url-13 301 example.com/new-url-13
example.com/old-url-14 301 example.com/new-url-14
example.com/old-url-15 301 example.com/new-url-15
example.com/old-url-16 301 example.com/new-url-16
example.com/old-url-17 301 example.com/new-url-17

23. Legacy Redirects
Don’t forget any existing redirects
URL A redirects to URL B (legacy redirect)
URL B redirects to URL C (new redirect)
Which results in the following redirect chain:
URL A –> URL B –> URL C
To eliminate this, amend the existing legacy redirect and
create a new one so that:
URL A redirects to URL C (amended legacy redirect)
URL B redirects to URL C (new redirect)
EXAMPLE

24. Image Redirects
Google recommends redirecting the old image URLs to the new image URLs to help Google
discover and index the new images quicker.
301
Redirect

25. Internal Link Updates
Internal Link
Updates
HTML LINKS
• Links to other URLs
• JavaScript Resource Links
• CSS Resource Links
• Image resource links
• Video Files
CSS LINKS
• Image Resources
• Internal Web Fonts
MISCELLANEOUS LINKS
• Robots.txt XML Sitemap Links
JAVASCRIPT LINKS
• Internal URLs
• Internal Image Files
• Internal CSS Links

26. RankingBenchmark
During a migration it is always advisable to start tracking keywords daily
when possible for a period both pre-migration and post-migration

27. Organic Ranking Tool.
Tracking organic rankings daily across desktop & mobile, including
site-links and answerbox results.
DESKTOP
Accuratelytrackingrankings
acrosslarge keywordsets
MOBILE
Mobile-firstready, tracking
rankingswithinthe mobile
SERPs.
ANSWERBOXRESULTS
Trackswhooccupies
answerboxresults whilstalso
scrapingtitles and snippets
SITE-LINKS
Seehowsite-linksdifferbetween
differenttracked keywordsand
howthey trend overtime.
EMAIL / TEXT MESSAGE / USER DASHBOARDS

28. GSC - Configuration
When changing to a new domain name, you need to ensure GSC is
configured correctly
➢ Target country is specified.
➢ All HTTP / HTTPS / WWW variants are added (4).
➢ Preferred domain is set up.
➢ URL Parameters are configured.
➢ Disavow has been added to all relevant properties!
➢ Use change of address.

29. Crawling & Evaluation
Sounds obvious – but crawling the new website in staging is vital before
go-live day.
➢ Broken Links
➢ InaccessibleContent
➢ Incorrect CanonicalUsage
➢ Broken HREFlang tags
➢ Incorrect META Data
➢ URL Structure
Key Checks:
➢ XML/HTML Sitemaps
➢ Heading Structures
➢ Page Speed
➢ 404 Page Status Code
➢ Schema
➢ Usability

30. Redirect Testing

31. PRO-TIP #2
DOUBLE & TRIPLE CHECK!

33. Migration Day!

34. PRO-TIP #3
DON’T PANIC! *
*Unlessit’saFriday…

35. Post-Migration
Checks

36. Robots.txt
First check: Is the Robots.txt disallowing User Agents?

37. Redirect Testing

38. Redirect Chains

39. Redirect Loop
URL A URL B URL A URL B URL A

40. Analyse Log Files

41. URL Monitor.
Proactively identify and resolve issues with key URLs in virtual real-time and circumvent
impact on organic search performance.
STATUSCODES
Real-timereportingofchanges
toURLstatus code,e.g.404 and
500 errors.
URLREDIRECTS
Ensure that key URLredirects
remaininplace withthe correct
status code,e.g.301.
INDEXATIONSTATUS
Identify changes toURL
indexation status via
monitoringofrobots/
canonicaltags etc.
CONTENTCHANGES
Bealerted tosudden,
unexpected changes toon-page
content – e.g.wordcount &file
size.
EMAIL / TEXT MESSAGE / USER DASHBOARD

42. URL Monitoring

43. GSC Monitoring / Tests

44. GSC Monitoring / Tests

45. GSC Monitoring / Tests

46. GSC Monitoring / Tests

47. GSC Monitoring / Tests

48. GSC Monitoring / Tests
Finally, you should check whether any important external resources are being blocked.

49. Page Speed

50. Mobile Test

51. Mobile Test
Utilise GSC to identify mobile-friendly errors, such as touch elements, font sizes etc.

52. Structured Data Review
Be sure to check the mark-up on both the desktop and mobile pages, especially if the mobile website
isn’t responsive.

53. Performance Monitoring
The gathering, measuring and benchmarking of key performance
indicators is essential to measure the success of a migration.
CLIENT

54. PRO-TIP #4
CELEBRATE SUCCESS

55. Want more insight?
Download our free whitepapers and sector reports
and watch our bi-weekly video news series at:
https://www.stickyeyes.com/resources/