Website migrations are an important thing for most businessmen, especially when their businesses are growing and expanding. What many business owners don’t know, though, is the risks of website migration and how to prepare for them. Changing the domain name or poorly migrating your website from HTTP to HTTPS may significantly affect your natural search traffic. However, using search engine optimization UK based services will prevent problems from happening. Here are the things that they do to make your website migration a success.

  1. Examine your analytics Once you migrated to your new website, it’s imperative that you quickly check if you lost any traffic. To do this, UK search engine optimization agencies make backups of the Google Analytics data so they’ll know the traffic’s status and the pages which are popularly visited. They export the Analytics data on your new website and run a side-by-side evaluation with all the information from your previous website. Through this method, you’ll know which pages lost traffic. Most of the time, a loss in traffic is going to be isolated to individual pages, instead of occurring throughout the whole website.
  2. Best time for your website migration A well-monitored and planned website migration shouldn’t permanently negatively affect your traffic. This is why experts who provide search engine optimization services UK based will advise you to conduct your website migration during a slow period of the year. If it’s conducted during or shortly before the holidays, there’ll be major risks. SEO specialists always aim to prevent you from losing any traffic. However, if it happens, the most important thing is that you only lose a small amount of traffic since it’s done during the lowest peak of the year.
  3. Internal links should be up-to-date Internal links are the HTML tags in your website code that help you jump from page to page. You shouldn’t be tempted to leave them unchanged just because you did your redirects correctly. Having too many redirects will not only lower your PageRank, but also decrease your website’s overall performance. Why don’t you hire search engine optimization services UK based to solve this issue? SEO specialists can rewrite the hyperlinks simply by conducting a search and replace operation on the database. This updates your website’s name without making changes to the file construction (presuming you’re keeping your website structure exactly the same).
  4. Map your new website Site navigation is essential to please your customers. They will most likely return to your website if they easily find what they are looking for. SEO experts can create a sitemap that makes sense and is convenient for your guests. These search engine optimization UK based agencies will also ensure that your website will have a sleek user experience.
  5. Avoid duplicate contents Website migrations usually lead to duplicate content issues. This takes place when both numerous versions of your links are published, and that can damage your traffic. Instead, SEO specialists use redirects, so if a person uses the old URL, they will be redirected to your new website.
  6. Remove broken pages All of your links on your new website should be working properly. This is why UK search engine optimization companies crawl new websites to ensure that there are no 404 pages. If they come across one, they don’t use these pages to redirect to your homepage. It’s important for them to find a good replacement for a 404 page, but if not, then it is much safer to remove these pages. This is only if you don’t have a lot of broken pages.
  7. Correctly set up Google Search Console A new property in Google Search Console should be set up for your new domain name. SEO agencies will always verify that it’s set up to the proper version, accounting for HTTP vs. HTTPS and www vs. non-www. Your sitemaps from both old and new websites will also be submitted to solidify the message that your previous website has been redirected to the new one.

They’ll also submit a change of address in the Google Search Console, let Google crawl the new sitemap, and use “fetch as Google” to publish your new website to be indexed. It is also their responsibility to check that all your redirects and hyperlinks are correct before accomplishing this task.

You should always consider hiring SEO experts so you won’t lose search engine traffic when moving to a new website. The things mentioned above are helpful steps that SEO agencies do to make your website migration successful. Go and avail of search engine optimization UK based services now so you can expect a sleek and efficient process.