Make sure the new website is better than the old one

Make sure the new website is better than the old one

When you move content from an old site to a new one, ensure that the new site is faster, cleaner, and overall more SEO friendly than the one you left. Otherwise, even if you do everything perfectly, you may end up with worse results. Don’t do unnecessary work on yourself.

3. Set up tracking before migrating the site

Before you make any changes to your old website, make sure you have the data you need to track migration progress before, during, and after the migration. All you need to do is enter your target domain into your competitor list and create a dashboard that compares your rankings, indexed pages, backlinks, and organic search traffic to your previous domain.

4. Create a complete 301 redirect map

This is the most important step in the migration process and I’ll tell you why: you need to inform search engines that you’ve moved your site to a new location and they need clear instructions on how to change the address. Otherwise, all the links you have acquired over the years and all the profitable keyword rankings you have acquired will disappear. Download all URLs of your website; As best you can, set the appropriate URL on the new website. During migration, each URL must be mapped to an appropriate new URL based on the content of those pages. Enter it into a spreadsheet.

You will use this document to apply permanent 301 redirects to all old pages and direct users and search engine crawlers to the new and improved version of the page. Caution: Your engineering team may want to try temporary 302 redirects, as they are often easier to implement. Don’t disappoint them!302 redirects tell search engines that you want to keep all rankings and links to your old pages and only drive traffic to your new pages for a short time.

This is important during migration. 301 redirects cause all the keywords your old pages are ranking for to be replaced by the new landing page from the old landing page. Setting your URLs this way also ensures that you don’t lose pages and end up with a 404 Not Found error. Once your website is migrated, the previous page should no longer contain 404, 302, or 5XX.You should redirect all 301 errors to a specific URL with the new address. Otherwise, you won’t keep your old assortments and will have to start over with a new assortment.