Recent statistics reveal that 93% of online user experiences start with a search engine. Further, search engines drive more traffic than social media to content sites by as much as 300%.

If you depend on your website SEO to generate leads and revenue, what happens when you need a website update? You do not want to have to start all over again with boosting your SEO.

Don’t worry, because, with the correct website migration, you will not have to. In this article, you will learn step by step how to keep your website SEO in its current form, even when it’s time to spruce up your website design.

Keep reading for important instructions.

Website Migration Checklist

Before you do anything, create a checklist. While there are recommendations for your website update, you will need to create a website migration checklist that is unique to your needs. Here are some items to include.

Deadlines

Without creating a schedule to migrate a website, important tasks will fall by the wayside, and you may never complete your website update. Not only that, but you want visitors to see a fully functioning website. When you are making changes live, you want to choose a time with low traffic to minimize the impact.

Scope of Website Revision

What is your goal for the website migration? What do you want to achieve? Who will help you achieve it?

Ask yourself all the big questions. Once you have all the answers, getting it through to the finish line will be a lot simpler.

Use a Sandbox

It is important to have a sandbox for testing, and before anything goes live. Redirects could be broken, and you will want to fix that while you are testing. Review all data before you move a website.

Create a List of URLs for Redirects

The first step after you have your sandbox will be to crawl the old website. There are good options for software that can help you achieve this. Extract your old site’s URLs.

Next, add GSC data, or Google Search Console data. To extract the data, you can pull it from your search results pages tab. For the data you wish to pull, you must specify the time interval.

Once you are complete harvesting the data using the GSC, create a list of all the site’s URLs in the sandbox. This is a good time to clean up, too. Remove URLs with special characters in them and remove duplicates.

The goal here is to maintain clean URLs without having to rewrite them. Also, remove URLs which contain extensions like .js and .css.

Plus, if there are images that are stored but not showing on the original site, remove them. You do not want unnecessary images as part of the website migration.

Map Your Redirects

To maintain the integrity of your website SEO, next, create a redirect map. It may be easiest just to use Microsoft Excel to document your map.

Here is what you do first. Remove any URLs that are from the new website update that are 100% the same as the URLs from the old website.

Any time you see a 301 or 200 response code, this means that the URL currently exists, or it has configured 301 redirects already. Exclude these from your redirect map. You are only looking for URLs that return a 404 error code.

To maintain the integrity of your website SEO, we recommend Lemon Pulse’s SEO consultancy.

Set Up Redirects on New Website Update

There are a few options for supporting the redirect configuration to your website migration, such as a .htaccess file or plugins. We recommend you use a .htaccess file using the formula =CONCATENATE. Across three cells, combine the data and then combine strings.

Test Your Redirect

Now, remember the URLs with the 404 error response code? At this time, you can check them. Testing them again, you should see a 301 instead of a 404, so you can redirect them.

Reconfigure Old Domain Redirects

The old domain redirects will need to be reconfigured to the new website update. If you have the .htaccess file from the last step, this is likely the easiest way to configure it. Take the old site’s .htaccess file and finish.

Set up redirects by page. The goal is for all URLs from the old domain to redirect to the website host URLs.

Final Inspection

If you follow the steps from the article to a tee and take your time, your website migration should be in good shape. Rarely are these situations ever perfect, though. Prep yourself to locate and fix challenges left behind after you do your due diligence.

Do not go live with your website migration until you ensure everything is in the right place. Errors can hurt your website’s SEO, and you should be following these steps to make sure that is not the case. Conduct a thorough, last sweep.

In the GSC, Change the Domain

Finally, you can change the domain in your GSC. Use the Change of Address Tool. Here is a link to instructions from Google Support to help you.

Website Migration

Do not lose your valuable website SEO. Use this guide and get your website migration done correctly and keep collecting leads. We know you work hard for your business, and you deserve better than an unnecessary setback like lost SEO work.

For more brilliant advice on how to keep moving forward, don’t bounce. We have many more articles to help your business flourish. Stick around and keep clicking.