For SEOs, one of the most difficult things about the whole job is dealing with a site migration. There are so many moving parts, and often times everyone is in such a rush to move things over that steps are often forgotten. Most of the time, a site migration may not be as necessary as a business owner may think. It’s extremely stressful and challenging to move an entire eCommerce site, or big brand name website — especially if this requires moving from one CMS to another.
There’s bound to be a mistake somewhere during the migration which can lead to a myriad of issues that may not be as obvious as, say, crashing a site. These issues end up impacting SEO significantly; there can be drops in rankings, traffic, site speed and performance. However, what all these SEO issues boil down to are different, secondary problems such as the following.
- Bad UX. User experience is key these days, and if you’re going to migrate a site, you’re going to want to make sure to utilize tools such as Google Search Console to keep track of 404 errors. If you don’t provide 301 redirects to these newly broken pages from your previous site, this creates a bad user experience and can cause drop-offs and decreased time on site.
- Break Conversion Tracking. Conversion tracking is one of the major factors SEOs and business owners have to determine whether or not their website is giving them leads. Conversion tracking can include just about anything, from contact forms and click-to-calls to products purchased. Migrating a site can often break any conversion tracking code you’ve installed and set up through Google Analytics. It’s important to check your goal conversions once your new site is live.
- Limit Site Growth. These days we get a lot of clients stating that they want to keep their site plain and simple; nothing fancy, nothing crazy. It seems that many people don’t want to overwhelm their potential customers with information when, in reality, it’s okay to have content on your site; it’s okay to have an interactive video describing your product or service; it’s okay to have catchy colors (in fact, we encourage this for call-to-action buttons). When sites are migrated, their growth and scale is often impeded by the design and CMS, preventing future pages or content from being added.
At Boston Web Marketing, there’s a reason we give a standard website build time for those who want to migrate their site. It’s important to take the time and get things right the first time around in order to prevent often irreparable SEO damage in the future. If you’re thinking about a site migration but aren’t sure how to go about doing this the proper way without damaging your online presence, contact Boston Web Marketing today to discuss your options.