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It’s the start of the year, and you’re already in talks about carrying out an in-house migration. Think again. A website migration is a huge project that, when not carefully considered, can quickly harm your business. We don’t just mean your website, but your overall online visibility, rankings and your sales and revenue. What appears to be a relatively straightforward task on paper can take weeks or months of preparation, and if it doesn’t, you’re likely to be missing key elements of the process to secure your SEO. Don’t repeat the same errors of many eCommerce brands. Make sure you prepare for these mistakes and learn how to avoid them.
What Is A Website Migration?
Many eCommerce sites will experience at least one site migration in their lifetime. They typically occur when a site undergoes substantial changes that can affect its search engine rankings and traffic. Normally, a migration involves moving a website/URLs/platforms to another, newer version, and, if done properly, can lead to longer-term SEO success.
Why Do eCommerce Sites Go Through A Migration?
There are several reasons why you may choose to conduct an eCommerce site migration, including:
- A change in CMS or platform: You may no longer find your existing platform sufficient for your needs and require a more powerful solution to support your growth
- HTTP to HTTPS: More non-HTTPS websites are being flagged as ‘dangerous’, meaning it’s more important than ever to ensure you’re trading on an HTTPS website. Moving your site and URLs to HTTPS requires a migration
- Change of domain: Perhaps you’ve rebranded or no longer think your current URL describes your business. To maintain your existing SEO value, you’ll need to migrate all URLs and content to a new domain
Regardless of the reason for migrating your website, it’s important to ensure it is carried out correctly to maintain the SEO value and visibility of your website.
SEO Migration Horror Stories & How To Avoid The Same Mistakes
Ranking & Organic Traffic Declines
Problem
It’s very common to experience fluctuations in your rankings and traffic in the immediate aftermath of a site migration. However, you don’t want these to continue for a prolonged period of time. A previous client approached us having migrated their website, only to lose over 50% of their traffic a few months later.
Migrating from one domain to another carries a lot of risk, primarily due to the strength of the new domain not being as strong as the domain you’re migrating from due to backlinks and where they are linking to. This impacts the overall authority of a domain, which we know is a Google ranking factor, and this, mixed with other poor migration planning, can lead to a decline on the new site.
Solution
We ensure that we curate detailed URL mapping documents for all of our eCommerce partners who are conducting a website migration. The purpose of the URL mapping document is to essentially inform Google which old URLs need their value passed to new ones.
2. Broken Internal Links
Problem
A broken internal link is a link that doesn’t work. While they will typically return a 404 page error, some 404 pages are more interesting than others, but generally, we don’t like 404 pages, regardless of how many cats they have on them.
This happens because historic website pages have not been mapped or redirected correctly.
Solution
It’s possible to use both Screaming Frog and Deepcrawl to identify broken links. Once identified, it’s simply a case of redirecting them to their rightful new owner. Not doing this risks a poor user experience and lost sales. But how do you avoid this in the first place? Ultimately, it comes back to using an efficient URL mapping document. Missing a few URLs is normal. The key is managing the majority before migration.
3. Lower Conversion Rate
Problem
Your conversion rate can plummet after a site migration. There can be many reasons for this, including:
- Carrying out a platform migration at the same time as redesigning your site – we’ve been there, done that, and it’s not easy to determine whether the platform or design is the cause
- Your form fill box has changed
- Your purchase process has new layers added to it, e.g. such as a compulsory sign-up process
- Your new pop-up ad is intrusive
Solution
Using tools such as Hotjar can help you gain an understanding of how users engage with your website. Are they clicking on an ad pop-up? Are they interacting with the form? Where are they bouncing? Having this data readily available will help you understand the user flow from discovering your site to making a purchase, how it evolves, and what to consider for your migration.
4. Manual Actions & Unnatural Links
Problem
When setting up your Google Search Console account, you may notice that you’ve been handed a manual action, which means that your site has been found to house unnatural links.
An unnatural link is sometimes referred to as a ‘spammy link’ and often originates from low-authority websites that link back to your website.
Solution
Before carrying out a website migration, it’s good practice to evaluate your backlink profile and conduct a disavow to remove those that fall into this criteria.
5. Indexation problems
Problem
In general, your URL indexation may differ on your migrated domain, so this isn’t usually a major concern. However, if your new site is not indexed at all (as highlighted in Google Search Console) or if there is a significant difference in the indexation count, then it’s important to take a closer look. This is a common issue we’ve experienced with eCommerce brands when they migrate to Magento with minimal SEO considerations, which then takes months or even years to recover.
It’s important to pinpoint whether there are more URLs being indexed due to content duplication, or because the previous domain is still being indexed. Google has a finite crawl budget, so it must be focused on your most valuable, revenue-generating pages. Unnecessary pages can waste budget.
Solution
First, establish if there are indexation errors:
- Check the indexing status in Google Search Console
- Enter incognito mode > Google > search for “site:” with your domain, e.g. “site:thisisnovos.com”
If your new site appears, it’s indexed. If your old site is visible, it’s also still indexed.
If your new website fails to appear, check the robots.txt file and ensure it’s not blocking crawler access. You can locate your robots.txt file by adding it to the end of your domain URL, e.g. www.example.com/robots.txt. You can also use Google Search Console’s Robots.txt Tester to check if you can access key pages and monitor the indexation process in Search Console.
Leading SEO Migration Services
There’s no room for trial and error when it comes to a site migration, which is why so many eCommerce brands recruit an SEO migration agency to help map out the stages and ultimately add a layer of security when making such a major website change that can affect both the business and customer experience.
For more information about how we can help you with an upcoming migration project, get in touch.