Website Migration
A website migration is a change to your website that’s so significant it impacts the site’s structure, performance, or traffic, It could be everything from updating the layout of your website to changing the URL structure, or moving your website to a new domain or content management system (CMS). The most common form of website migration is moving from one domain to another. But transitioning from HTTP to HTTPS and changing your URL structure are also types of migration. In some events, website migration is necessary for your business and certainly has many benefits, but on the downside, it could crash your site, cut your traffic in half, or change your site’s usability so much that revenue generation is severely affected. Migration has the possibility to derail your site’s performance, traffic, and other metrics.
Types of Website Migrations
- Protocol: Changing your website protocol from HTTP to HTTPS.
- Subdomain: Changing your website from yoursite.com to newsubdomain.yoursite.com.
- Domain: Changing your website URL from olddomain.com to www.newdomain.com.
- Top-level domain: Changing your website URL from a .com to a .org, .net, etc., or vice versa.
- Content management system: Moving your website from your current CMS to a new one, for instance, moving from WordPress or Joomla to the Umbraco CMS.
- Redesign: Making modifications that range from small aesthetic changes to the website layout to a full website revamp with major code and copy changes.
- Structural: Changing the website architecture or structure, which usually means changing either the user flow of a website or the URL structure on which the website is built.
- Hybrid or combination: Using a combination of the above types of migrations.
Why Migrate Your Website? Start your process by defining why you are migrating your site and what it will look like. Do you need to transfer the entire site to a new domain name, or will it only affect a portion of your current site?
For instance, if you’re moving your site to HTTPS, an objective may be to retain traffic levels. On the other hand, you may want to grow traffic if you’re moving to a .com domain for international reach.
Migration Services
- SEO migrations.
- Content Management System Migration.
- Web Hosting Migration.
- Domain name migrations.
- Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager migrations.
SEO Migration: Our goal with any website migration is to quickly and efficiently move your website, mitigating SEO risk and reducing website downtime during the process. One way we do this is by collaborating with our in-house SEO experts (who are also Moz Oracles) to ensure all pages redirect properly and all SEO best practices are in place at launch. We’ll even score and prioritize your content to give you a roadmap for improving content on the new site and optimizing for search engines moving forward.
Our SEO migration services include Current site URL crawl and page inventory, Analytics benchmarking, Comprehensive URL redirect mapping, Internal link updates, Page canonicalization, Duplicate content removal, Site move verification with Google and Bing, Backlink updates, and ranking/visibility benchmarking.
Content Management System Migration: Whether your website is on WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Umbraco, Merchello, DNN Software, TYPO3, or another CMS, our website migration experts are ready to seamlessly migrate your current website to your CMS of choice
Our CMS migration process includes: Evaluating your current website, CMS migration strategy, In-depth SEO best practices analysis, Website design elements migration, Import content, Test website functionality, Review website, and Launch strategy.
Web Hosting Migration: Our web hosting migration services include: Helping you evaluate and choose a new web host, Creating appropriate backups of your website data, Importing your website to a new hosting provider, Preventing downtime, Implementing the migration process, and Updating your domain.
Domain Name Migration: Changing your domain name can be almost as risky as migrating your entire website. Search engines use your domain and domain structure to help crawl your website and a dramatic change could cause chaos. Our team ensures that an appropriate redirect strategy is in place to help guide search engines and transfer authority to your new domain.
Our domain name migration services include URL mapping and redirect strategy, Consultation on best practice implementations, Search engine crawler analysis, Repair site navigation and internal links, Post-migration analysis and recommendations, and Troubleshoot database errors. While domain name migration is a fairly straightforward process, there are many factors that can affect a successful migration. Our team will ensure that your domain migration goes smoothly by utilizing our extensive expertise and our access to data and technology.
