Treat a site migration like moving house

Sanja says: “If you’re going to work on site migrations, look at it as moving house.

You want to make sure that the valuable items are not lost on the way, and that your new house is much cleaner, nicer, and tidier than your old house.

A lot of us have experience with moving house, and it can end up being a nightmare a lot of the time. That’s why it’s important that you plan everything correctly – prepare all the boxes, but also, you will probably need some people to help you.

In SEO terms, that means having knowledgeable teams to work on site migrations. You need to make sure that everything on your old website is saved into boxes that you then move to your new house: your new site. In terms of the technical aspects, the content, and the user experience, you want the new site to be better than your previous ones. That is one of the goals of site migrations.

You need to have experienced teams, you need to make decisions based on data, and you need to establish really good communication between all the teams you are working with. That’s the best way to ensure that SEO recommendations are implemented properly, and you have a successful site migration.”

Are you referring to a specific type of site migration?

“No. Site migration can happen for many reasons, and it can involve migration to a new CMS, changing international strategies, etc. It can also apply to any kind of business.

I think this tip is important because, if you’re an SEO specialist, you will probably work on site migrations at some point in your career, and there are certain steps that you need to follow. Even when you do follow these steps, a mess can happen because not everything depends on you.

I’m not referring to any specific scenario; I’m referring to site migrations in general.”

How do you go about preparing for a site migration?

“Normally, you start by defining all the phases of the site migration, which will involve different milestones and activities you will be conducting on the new site, the old site, or both.

I normally outline the main phases of site migration, and then I outline all the activities that we will conduct. This applies to any kind of migration, although there can be some differences. For example, if you are going to migrate to a new domain, if you’re changing the international strategy, or if you’re just changing CMS, it can be a little bit different.

Generally, the first initial planning phase includes defining the objectives of the site migration, setting milestones, and establishing timelines so you have a plan to follow.

Then, there is the launch of the preparation phase, where you work on your legacy site and also on your new site – the dev site. In this phase, you will conduct a lot of audits on your legacy site – both from a technical standpoint, but also content audits. Those are really important because content often gets sacrificed for the sake of good-looking websites. That’s a big mistake. You need content to drive traffic.

This is a really important phase, where you can decide which is the priority content, that you need to migrate, and which is the content that you can retire.”

Do you look at which pieces are driving traffic to decide what is priority content and what can be retired?

“Yes. I would normally use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to identify the pages that are bringing the highest portion of clicks from different countries.

I would also use these tools to identify the keywords that are actually driving traffic to these pages. That is something that you need to look at so that you can protect those keywords when you move the content from one site to another.

You would normally focus on metrics like clicks and click-through rate to define the important pages.”

Do you keep the URLs when you’re migrating?

“You need to make sure that the content is there, then you have to deploy a 301 redirect from the legacy page to the new page. This is the signal for Google that you are moving from one place to another. It’s a permanent redirect that tells them, you used to have this page, but now you’re permanently going to move that content to this new page, which is the equivalent.

This is also really important from the standpoint of user experience. Imagine going on a website that you’re used to and, suddenly, there are changes to the links they include in their content. You try to click on a link that you expect will take you to the page you’re looking for but, if it’s not been done correctly in the site migration, it can take you to the homepage. That’s not the content you want to see. You want to see the equivalent of what you have seen before.

When it comes to deploying the redirect plan, you need to make sure that the pages are equivalent, from a user experience perspective as well as a search engine perspective.”

How much time do you expect there to be between starting the migration thought process and actually implementing the migration?

“It depends on the goal of the migration, how many aspects you have in mind, and how big the migration is going to be. It also depends on whether you have a whole SEO team dedicated to it or they’re working for an agency, or both – basically on the available resources to do the work.

On average, the initial planning phase can take around a month and then preparation, when you work on the dev site and the legacy site, can take from 3-4 months. It really depends on the size of the website.

Then you have the testing phase, where you are going to test your dev site and make sure everything is fine before you go to launch. You’re checking that the website has proper internal linking, that you’re following all the SEO technical best practices, and that it’s going to be crawlable, indexable, etc.

Of course, when you are working on the dev site version, you need to make sure that Google is not able to crawl and index this website. If you don’t do that, it will create a complete mess in your search results.

What also happens quite a lot is that, on launch day, you forget to remove the directives from the robot.txt that tell Google that your site should not be crawled, or the directives that tell Google that the website should not be indexed. Then it’s 10 days past your migration and you’re thinking, ‘Where is our website?’

You really need to have a plan with all the activities listed, then you can just check the boxes. That’s how you make sure you didn’t miss anything.”

Are there specific people that need to be involved in migration discussions?

“As a specialist, you’re one of the most important parts of this task, but you’re not actually the most important. Everyone is important.

Apart from us, web designers, developers, and the project manager who will be managing this whole project need to be involved.

The most important thing is that you have easy communication with the dev team because they’re the ones who are going to implement everything you say. That’s the most important communication channel.”

How do you know that a site migration has been successful?

“It’s natural that, after a site migration, there is a decline in traffic. Google’s algorithms still need to figure out that you have actually done a site migration, so there won’t actually be a decline in positions and traffic. A migration is considered to be successful when, after this short period of time, you are back on track.

You’ve moved all the content, you’ve moved all the links, and you are now performing as well as you were before – or even better, hopefully. That is what you would consider a successful site migration

In terms of metrics, first of all, you would look at how your website is indexed. Then, you would look at the ranking position and the visibility you have in the search results. If you’re targeting multiple markets, you would be doing this for multiple markets. Then, of course, you have traffic and user engagement metrics.

If your goal was to improve user experience on the site, for example, then you can look at average time on site, bounce rate, conversions, etc. All of those metrics can tell you if you had a successful site migration.”

What are the most common reasons why site migrations fail and how do you avoid making mistakes?

“First of all, it’s when no one is actually listening to the SEO teams. We provide a lot of recommendations on how to do things, but we live in the real world. People do not account for a limited budget or limited time. They often cut SEO for the sake of other activities.

That’s when you end up with a problem because someone did not correctly deploy a redirect plan, for example. A redirect plan deployed incorrectly or not deployed at all to the new site is another reason why migrations fail, because you lose the authority you used to have. It becomes really hard because you have to start building it up from scratch.

To avoid making mistakes, you can use something like a Gantt chart to keep track of each phase and monitor everyone’s responsibilities. Create a chart that shows what you have to do in the planning phase, then what you have to do in the pre-launch preparation phase, and then all the audits that you have to do, etc. You need to make sure that all of those things are done.

Then, you apply these learnings on the new site. Then, you have the testing phase with the different activities you have to do. Then, you have the launch day phase where you also have to track and control everything to make sure it is working fine, and the site is being crawled and indexed properly.

Then you have the monitoring phase, which is a little bit more relaxed because you have already done everything, so you just have to monitor and keep an eye out for issues.”

Should SEOs ever recommend against some form of migration?

“It depends on what you think the actual benefit of a site migration would be. If you have multiple domains targeting different countries, and you already have authority on these domains, moving them to a single gTLD could be even more beneficial because you will consolidate all that authority on one domain. Of course, as long as you do the site migration correctly.

In some instances, like rebranding, it will be more of a business decision than an SEO decision. There are cases where a site migration may not be a good idea, but it will depend on the specific goals of the business and what they expect to achieve with a site migration.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“I think they should stop spamming people on LinkedIn about backlinks.

I receive a lot of spam messages, almost every day, trying to buy backlinks. I just don’t believe in that practice. Stop spamming and focus on learning about site migrations.”

Sanja Markovic is a Senior SEO Specialist, and you can find her over at Webcertain.com.