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The SEO’s Guide to Website Migration: 2025 Edition
Note: This guide was originally written in 2015, but it is updated every year to reflect relevant new trends and changes in the industry. This guide is your website migration…
Successfully migrate your website without losing visibility
We provide comprehensive SEO website migration services to help you successfully migrate your site whilst protecting your rankings.
Website migrations present a lot of risks when it comes to SEO, so it’s essential to have the right team on your side during this process. Poorly managed migrations can result in severe traffic and ranking losses, whilst can result in lost conversions and revenue too.
Fortunately, our SEO specialists will support you throughout every step of the website migration process and put measures in place to protect those vital rankings. We’ll carry out in-depth technical and content audits, check sitemaps, implement redirects and more to ensure your migration runs as smoothly as possible
Work with usWhen you’re planning your website migration, SEO should be at the forefront of your mind when making any changes. Website migration mistakes can cost you dearly if you’re not careful and your revenue and profits can suffer as a result.
Over time, your site has accrued valuable backlinks, keyword rankings, organic visibility and equity. When you change domains, URL structure, website copy or other components during a migration, you risk losing some or all of the SEO value you’ve built up over the years. As such, it’s vital to implement an efficient SEO strategy for your migration, completing the necessary checks before and after the change to ensure there’s little to no negative impact.
There are several types of website migrations, including existing and new domain migrations, HTTP – HTTPS migrations and migrations to combine domains. Each of these options comes with its own benefits and SEO risks.
For example, a domain migration presents risks with URL restructuring, technical changes and it can take a significant amount of time to crawl and reindex the site. Alternatively, when combining domains you risk harming your SEO if you inherit spammy backlinks, but you could also increase your rankings by combining Domain Authority.
With our SEO website migration services, we aim to alleviate these risks with in-depth pre-migration checks and audits. This helps us to identify the main causes for concern in the migration and put the appropriate measures in place to minimise damage.
Before making any changes, it’s essential to create a tailored SEO migration plan for your site with the help of an experienced SEO agency.
SEO migration plans are usually quite technical in nature and detail all SEO components that need to be considered during the website migration, including URL restructuring, backlink audits, XML sitemaps and so on.
It’s also essential for SEO agencies to take a cross-channel approach to SEO migrations. By this, we mean taking every opportunity available to minimise potential negative impacts. SEO migration plans often include social media activity adjustments too.
There’s a lot of moving parts to consider when it comes to website migrations and an SEO migration plan ensures you’ve covered all bases. Generally, they’ll include the following steps:
It’s essential to have an SEO agency on board that understands all the factors that need to be considered during the website migration process. They’ll also need the proper tools to put your SEO migration plan into action.
We’ll work closely with you to create a personalised SEO migration plan that fits your site’s exact needs. With CandidSky you can rest in the knowledge that our team will oversee every aspect of your migration, carrying out meticulous checks throughout each stage.
Before your website migration, we’ll carry out a technical SEO audit and site crawl to identify any risks that may impact your SEO. We’ve developed our own SEO migration checklist for this purpose and this involves analysing technical factors such as:
The reason why we carry out a technical audit before your migration is to identify a baseline for any future changes. It’s like taking a snapshot of the technical health of your website so that improvements can be made and you can easily see what has been affected post-migration.
Once this pre-migration audit is complete, we’ll then create a detailed report that outlines our findings and highlights any SEO problems you need to address before your website migration. It’s essential to resolve all SEO issues before the change so you don’t risk losing rankings during or after the migration.
The post-migration technical audit involves assessing the same factors as the pre-migration audit and carrying out any SEO fixes that your website may need. Our SEO experts will compare your site’s performance before and after the migration to make sure nothing has been affected negatively as a result of the move.
This also allows us to identify whether or not our SEO efforts have been successful so if there are any positive changes, we’ll be able to put these down to the new site implementation.
301 redirect mapping is a crucial part of the site migration process. This is because it helps with SEO continuity and the transfer of SEO value from an old domain or page to a new one. It’s vital that 301 redirects are implemented correctly to protect your SEO and rankings when moving domains, updating templates/layouts etc.
During this process we’ll crawl your site, analyse your XML sitemap and look out for:
Error Codes e.g. pages with
Diagnosing any or all of the above issues early on will ensure that you don’t exacerbate them during the migration process.
Effectively mapping redirects will help you to avoid broken links and duplicate copy penalties. Implementing too many redirects can also waste crawl budget, which will negatively impact your SEO and UX.
If you’re not employing the services of an SEO agency with the right technical expertise, you risk causing long-term damage to your online visibility. Our SEO experts have the tools to effectively mitigate these risks and give your new website the best chances of success.
Work with usBefore and after a website migration, we’ll track your keyword rankings to assess how well the site has performed after the change. We’ll use tools such as STAT and Google Search Console to create a baseline of rankings to use as a comparison when your migration is complete.
Website migrations can involve making significant changes to your site. Ranking fluctuations may occur over time, however, if there are drastic drops in rankings post-migration, it’s likely that something has gone wrong during this process. This also helps us accurately assess any positive changes, which will give you peace of mind knowing that your SEO efforts have been successful.
This process doesn’t need to be stressful. As SEO specialists, we’re here to guide you through the process and make sure everything goes smoothly. With our help, not only will you see positive SEO results post-migration, but SEO value should also be retained after you’ve successfully transitioned to your new site – giving you increased visibility and traffic for months to come.
Work with usHere at CandidSky, we offer comprehensive SEO site migration services designed to protect your SEO value and rankings, no matter how big the change is.
Our strategy focuses on implementing best practices, including 301 redirect mapping, helping you to avoid SEO continuity issues post-migration and increasing organic traffic levels and rankings in the process.
We have industry-leading SEO tools at our disposal, giving us access to reams of insightful website and industry data. With this, we’re able to carefully track any changes to key metrics before and after the process is complete – giving you peace of mind that SEO value has been retained through this essential transition period.
We’ll also audit your website’s content and technical health as part of our SEO website migration services. The end result? You can take comfort in knowing that all aspects of your site are taken care of and your website won’t be negatively affected as a result of the migration.
If SEO isn’t considered during a website migration, then it can definitely affect your website’s SEO visibility. If you’re planning on migrating your website and you want to maintain those ever-important rankings, it’s recommended that you work with an SEO agency during the planning stages. This ensures that content, page redirects, technical improvements and your website’s backlink profile are all considered.
When a website has changed domain names, it’s important to use the ‘Change of Address’ tool on Google Search Console. This informs Google that your old website has now changed to a new address.
If your domain name is remaining the same, then this isn’t a necessary step to take. Once a site has been migrated, you should submit your sitemap to Google Search Console to prompt all of the URL changes. Google will index all of the new URLs and if there are any redirection issues, they will show up in your Google Search Console dashboard.
Some of the biggest issues that can occur during a website migration include:
Note: This guide was originally written in 2015, but it is updated every year to reflect relevant new trends and changes in the industry. This guide is your website migration…
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