The Completely Comprehensive SEO Website Migration Checklist
Kelvin Newman
Founder of brightonSEO - World's largest search marketing conference & tradeshow and now owner of PPC Hero, SearchLove & Hero Conf!
There's no getting around it, if you're planning a complete site overhaul it's going to have a big impact on your SEO work. A site migration is a significant project and as such should be carefully considered and planned.
Below we have a checklist of the necessary steps required for a migration plus further specific explanations of what that work might entail.
It's worked well for me over the years and hopefully will make your life a little easier too.
Planning
Establish Potential Impact of Migration.
In the long term site redesigns and migrations are designed to improve sites. Despite this improvement site migration can have an impact. Rankings will fluctuate, traffic may fall and onsite conversions can be effected.
An estimate of this impact, including the longer term upside should be created and shared with all key stakeholders. Particularly if the website is the main source of leads or sales for your business.
Time Migration for Minimal Impact.
As discussed site migrations can have a tangible impact of the search channels performance towards a site’s objectives. As such it makes sense to time any site migration around seasonal periods of low demand.
This decision should be based on both the traffic to the website, i.e. when is it lowest but also the market as a whole using tools like Google Trends, to understand when demand in the market is lowest as well.
Additionally if you are an international business you may be able to “test” your redesign in smaller markets. i.e. roll-out first in low traffic territory and refine for roll-out in higher traffic geographies.
Explore alternative traffic sources to mitigate short term traffic loss.
As natural search traffic is likely to decrease in the immediate roll-out of site migration it can be prudent to explore whether investment in other traffic sources can help reduce or eliminate the shortfall. I.e. could budget be allocated to paid search or investment in other organic channels, like social media efforts being increased to deliver more traffic.
If you’re planning budgets, it may make sense to allocate spend to mitigate the short term anticipated impact of a redesign and migration.
Communicate Scope of Work Required.
Website redesigns are complex projects often with tight deadlines, as such it’s important to understand the scope of work required for a site migration from an SEO perspective and ensure that the resource required to deliver this is available at the appropriate points in the timeline. This work will include both time for a search specialist to make the recommendations and the implementation of these changes by web development specialists.
It’s worthwhile to share with developers a functional spec of all the work you would require carried out on a new site. This will have an impact on the scope of the web development project, when a web design agency are pitching for the work they should understand the nature of these requests and reflect them in the scope of the work.
Where domains are being changed consider staggering site redesign.
Site redesigns and migrations where the website and URLs are changed but the domain is remaining the same are lower in risk than where the domain is also being changed. One way to reduce risk is to stagger the domain change and redesign process. This splits the impact and allows you to isolate the impact of the changes.
Pre-launch
Ensure test environments of the new site cannot be indexed by Search Engines.
While working with a staging server or test environment on your new website ensure it can’t be indexed by search engines by using both your Robots.txt file and the NoIndex tag in the <head> of all pages of your websites. Additionally you should password protect your testing area to prevent browsers accessing the site.
Take Full Crawl of Old Site.
Taking a full crawl of all the of the pages on the old site and key information about these pages is an important step in the migration process. This will give you the urls which you will need to potentially map to the new website and important information about those pages currently.
If you are expecting an extensive reworking of the site’s design and information architecture this is particularly important.
Export List of All Pages of Old Site with Links.
Using a tool like OpenSiteExplorer or Majestic (or both) compile a list of all the pages with external links pointing at them. These pages will be top priorities to redirect, they will be responsible for your natural search performance.
This, along with the other exports, should be run near the date of the expected migration to fully capture the most recent links and pages added to your website.
Export List of All Pages With More Than One Visitor in the Last 12 Months.
From your Analytics platform take a report of all your pages which have received one visitor in the past 12 months, these will be high priority pages for redirection.
Export List of all Pages Shared on Social Media.
Using a tool such as BuzzSumo or Social Crawlytics discover your most socially shared content. Export a list of these pages, these are likely to be a high priority for redirection as this is content which has clearly connected with your audience now or in the past.
Export List of All Pages Currently Indexed by Search Engines.
Use a tool like Scrapebox to get a list of all of the pages of your site currently indexed by the search engines. If time allows, you would want to ensure each of these links is redirected to the most appropriate page on the new site. Where this is not possible consider categorising pages into buckets and redirecting them as a group to important category pages or the homepage of your site. In many cases this will require some degree of automation to deal with the scale of the pages within the site.
Combine the list of URLs to Redirect and Prioritise.
Using Excel combine these different lists, de-duplicate URLs in more than one list and prioritise the URLs and how important their redirection is. Ideally you want all of these pages redirected, the allocation of resource will dictate how much time you will spend finding the most appropriate page to redirect to.
Create URL Redirect Map.
With your list of prioritised list of URLs on the old site create a redirect map of where each of these old URLs will be redirected to on the new website. Use 301 rather 302 redirects.
As previously discussed this will often require some degree of automation to deal with the sheer number of the pages within the site and Google Index.
Audit Redirect Map for Wildcard and Regular Expression Simplification Opportunities.
With your complete map of planned redirects audit the list to see if the total number of redirects can be reduced using either Wildcard or Regular Expression redirects.
Generate .htaccess File Encapsulating all required Redirects.
Assuming the site is using a PHP server create the list of required redirects using the correct syntax used in the .htaccess file that can be cut and pasted into the file by your web developer.
Make and Keep Backup of Old Website.
Where possible it’s advisable to keep a version of the old site in a password protected environment blocked to the search engines using the robots.txt file and noindex head tag on this test site. This backup will allow you to refer back to specific changes. Where certain pages or keywords may have difficult transitions you can look back to what came before the current site.
Benchmark the Old Site’s Performance.
Using tools like Pingdom and Google’s Page Speed Insights take a benchmark report on your old website’s performance to make a comparison with your new website.
We recommend re-running these tests in close proximity to the relaunch to make the fairest possible comparison.
Benchmark Old Site’s Number of of Indexed pages Across Major Search Engines.
Using site:domain.com take a benchmark of the number of pages from your website currently indexed by the major search engines. This will help you understand changes in website indexation after site migration.
Benchmark the Number of Search Engine Entry Pages within your Analytics Platform.
Establish a benchmark report in the last year of how many different pages of your site acted as an entry point to your website.
Carry out Extensive On-Site Audit of the New Site.
While on the test server carry out a complete SEO audit of the new website. This will explore and make recommendations to improve the SEO of the website and will cover issues like site information architecture, title tags and content optimisation and schema.org mark-up.
When you’ve put together an extensive functional spec for the future website, the more closely this is adhered to in the design process the less potential work that will come as a consequence of the audit, however it should be expected that the audit will introduce a number of additional elements to a pre-launch snagging list.
A suitable amount of resource and breathing space in the launch timeline should be allocated.
Prepare a Robots.txt File for the New Site.
Create a Robots.txt file for your new website. This file will manage which areas of your site are accessible to search engine spiders and how they behave around your site. Ensure this doesn’t block search engines, as this is how it will have been set up in your test environment.
Prepare an XML Sitemap for the New Site.
Based upon the pages contained within your content management system ensure all the pages of your site are contained with a valid XML sitemap. Where you have more than 50,000 URLs in your site, split the sitemaps accordingly and create an index sitemap. I.e. a Sitemap of your XML Sitemaps.
Test for Broken Links.
On the test server check for broken links to pages that no longer exist. These links may be to internal pages or external websites. Where possible where internal links are in the body copy, ensure these links are pointing to the new location of pages rather than old location.
Launch
Ensure Crawler access.
Once the site is live on the web ensure the website is accessible to search engine crawlers using tools like Fetch as Googlebot. Ensure homepage and important internal pages are accessible and rendering to the Search Engines as you were expecting.
Ensure Webmaster Verification Codes are Live.
Ensure the Google Webmaster Tools & Bing Webmaster Tools verification codes are in place on the live site to ensure continued access to the Search Engines reporting and communication systems.
Check Robots.txt file is as expected.
Ensure that the robots.txt file live on the site is as expected and you specified pre-launch.
Ensure that NoIndex in the <head> has been removed for all pages.
In your test environment you will likely have implemented the NoIndex tag within the <head> tag ensure this has been removed from all the pages you want in Google’s Index.
Check that your redirects are 301s and are working as expected.
Test to see your specified redirects are working as expected. Use a HTTP Status Header checker to ensure that the redirects used are 301 and not 302 redirects. These would appear the same to the user but not to the search engines.
Check XML Sitemap is expected.
Ensure that the XML sitemap live on the site is as expected and you specified pre-launch, ideally at domain.com/sitemap.xml. Additionally check all the links in the sitemap work, investigate any links in the sitemap which aren’t returning the page expected.
Upload XML Sitemap to Search Engines.
Upload your new and current XML sitemap to the search engines within their webmaster areas.
Ensure all Title Tags and Meta Descriptions have been implemented.
New title tags and meta descriptions will likely be one of the major outcomes of the audit carried out on the site pre-launch. Ensure the Title Tags and Meta descriptions reflect those you specified.
Test for Broken Links.
Repeat your test for broken internal links on the live site to ensure that no link is pointing at a page that no longer exists. Where there are broken links either correct the location the link is pointing or remove the link.
Ensure that the live site doesn’t show Soft 404s.
On the live site test a dummy URL which should lead to a 404, ensure this is a proper 404 error rather than a “Soft 404” which appears to be a 404 but actually returns a 200 status code and leads to duplication of content on your website.
Check Analytics Codes are in Place and Working.
Ensure that your analytics codes are triggering as expected on normal and conversion pages, either on the page direct or within your tag management solution.
Monitor Real Time Analytics for Immediate Usability issues.
If using Google Analytics allocate some time and resource to monitoring Real Time Analytics on launch day to look for serious usability issues impairing your users ability to carry out key journeys and activities on the site.
Speed up re-indexation with social signals.
Social sharing has been known to increase the speed of indexation of new pages and re-crawling of existing pages. Make use of your social platforms to announce the redesign and hopefully speed up the crawling process. Pay particular attention to Google owned properties like Google+.
Check all internal links are followed.
Take a sample of pages of different types within the site and ensure that the internal links aren’t no-followed. If they are it will be hard to Google to index all your pages or reflect the importance of your most linked to internal pages.
Post Launch
Check Google and Bing Webmaster Tools for new Error messages.
Log-in to both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools daily to check for new error messages. Where issues do arise and are signaled by the search Engines respond urgently to the issues.
Contact Key Linking Websites.
Where possible contact the most important website’s linking to your website where the URL has changed. You will have a redirect in place but inform them the URL has changed and ask them to change to the new URL where possible.
Change all URLs on Owned Properties.
Carry assessment of URLs used on owned media properties like social media accounts, ensure all urls are pointing to the new URLs even where redirects are in place.
Check Cache for important internal pages.
Regularly check the search engine caches of your homepage and most important pages to understand when they are re-indexed. Where particular pages are taking longer to get re-indexed than expected consider additional social sharing and opportunities for links from frequently recached sites (e.g. news, social and blogs)
Compare Site Performance Benchmark.
Using the same tools as the benchmark, i.e. Pingdom and Google’s Page Speed Insights compare the new site’s performance compared to the old site. Where required recommend remedial work needed.
Compare Site Indexation to Benchmark.
Compare site indexation to benchmark report. Look out for large changes down suggesting areas of the new site not getting indexed or large increases suggesting potential duplication issues.
Compare Number of Search Engine Entry Pages with Benchmark
Compare the number of search engine entry pages reported in Web analytics on the new site compared to the new site.
There's also a PDF printable version of this document including a checklist available at here.
So there we have it, all the things I think you might need to cover as part of a redesign of your website from an SEO perspective.
Is there anything you think I'm missed? I'd love to expand and refine this list so please do let me know on Twitter or by email kelvin@brightonseo.com
18+ Years Experience in SEO | Marketing Consultant | Head of Search at Footprint Digital
8yGreat list Kelvin. I did a similar post in 2014 (https://www.highposition.com/blog/the-website-re-launch-seo-checklist/) which has a few additional details for important considerations such as how to check redirects are operational, how to check for Google Analytics tracking codes, sanity checking canonical implementation etc. It's aimed at noobs but may provide some supporting information for your readers.
Senior SEO Engineer at Apple & Volunteer Mentor at Digital Boost
8yGood summary Kelvin. Could add a couple of WMT tasks, e.g., change of address/site move tool if new (sub)domain; any necessary changes to parameter filtering and geotargeting. Threshold of 1 visitor in 12 months seems low for "high priority", but that's something that should be determined on a case-by-case basis.
Principal SEO Strategist 🔵 Senior Director Consulting
8yWrong: "ensure it can’t be indexed by search engines by using both your Robots.txt file and the NoIndex tag in the <head> of all pages of your websites." Using robots.txt-file will prevent search engines to see the noindex-tag. If a link accidently point to a staging url it's getting indexed. Better: Use anoindex-tag, alternatively x-robots-tag together with a passwort protected directory managed by your .htaccess-file.
Co-Founder @ Life Science Networks | Pharma & Biotech Partnering Events and Communities
8yFantastic post Kelvin, very useful. Thank you.
FCIM - "Fellow of the CIM" - Awarded (Degree) Level 6 'Digital Strategy', and Distinction in Photography ( Nov 2017)
8yReally, good