Neil Patel’s Website Migration Checklist

Website migrations are sometimes necessary when moving to a new CMS or programming framework, site redesign, or rebranding. Despite the potential increase in revenue, migrations are not without risk. 

A bad migration can result in decreased technical performance, plummeting search engine rankings, and total traffic loss. Think of a brick-and-mortar business that’s moving to a new area. They want to grow a larger clientele but can’t risk completely losing the old audience as well. The same thing applies with a web migration, a concept that we call URL equity.

To help guide you through the process, we’ve created a comprehensive checklist—download it here.

Across any given website, you can build up 100s or 1000s of URLs that rank for certain queries or have built up traffic and authority. Without a good migration strategy, all of that could be lost, and there’s no guarantee you will ever get it back. 

That’s why following a proven process and a website migration checklist is crucial. Because expert first-hand advice is also valuable, we have gathered input from 250 people working in digital marketing who have either launched or completed a website migration in the last year.

This guide covers

• What a website migration entails
• A checklist to migration success
• How website migrations impact digital marketers
• Example of a successful website migration

Key Takeaways

• Website migrations most commonly involve platform changes but can also include domain changes, changing URL structures, moving a subdomain to the root domain, and other adjustments.
• Website migrations can cause short-term drops in traffic and rankings, but the long-term SEO impact should be positive.
• Several website migration best practices will improve success rates. These include:
  • creating a detailed timeline, 
  • promoting the new website in advance
  • 301 redirecting URLs
  • monitoring 404s and other errors 
  • thoroughly testing the new environment.
• Most marketers are happy with the results of website migration. Four in ten survey respondents were very satisfied and 39 percent were somewhat satisfied. Only 12 percent were somewhat dissatisfied or dissatisfied.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Is a Website Migration?
  • Website Migrations and SEO
• Website Migration Checklist
  • 1. Plan and Preparation
  • How Agencies Can Help With Your Migration Plan
  • 2. Data Backup and Migration
  • 3. Content Audit and Optimization
  • 4. Redesign and Customization
  • 5. Training and Documentation
  • 6. Testing and Quality Assurance
  • 7. Launch and Monitoring
• Type-Specific Migration Steps
• Migration Challenges: What Are Marketers Focusing On?
  • What To Expect From A Website Migration
• Example of Successful Website Migration
  • The Challenge
  • The Solution
  • The Results
• Frequently Asked Questions About Website Migrations
• Conclusion

What Is a Website Migration?

A website migration or site migration is when a website moves to a different environment, usually causing a significant change to its structure, design, location, or underlying technology that can impact performance and traffic. The most common form of a website migration is moving from one domain to another. But transitioning from HTTP to HTTPS and changing URL structures are also types of migrations.

Here’s what NP Digital’s survey found as the most popular reasons to do a web migration:

• 31%: changing content management system or platform
• 24%: moving to a new domain
• 26.4%: are redesigning or restructuring the website
• 12.4%: switching hosting providers 
• 3.8%: other

A website migration might be necessary if an organization is moving to a different CMS, for example. Or, there may be a major branding/organization change that requires a migration. In some situations, one organization may acquire another company or business, requiring a consolidation of websites. But caution is always necessary.

Organizations should treat site migrations as major projects and allocate the necessary resources and budget. Preserving your site’s equity could be worth millions.

Website Migrations and SEO

There’s no getting away from the fact that a website design or migration can harm the SEO of a website in the short term. But the long view is actually very different.

The truth is website migrations, when done well can support SEO and lead to long-term increases in both rankings and traffic. 

This can happen for several reasons. An obvious improvement in traffic will typically occur when a website migrates a sub-domain (such as a blog or other supplementary content sub-domain) onto it’s root domain, since the sub-domain content can now take advantage of the usually much stronger authority of the main domain.

Improvements can also occur when a brand migrates from one CMS to a more powerful alternative that helps improve site speed, performance, SEO implementation speed, as well as the overall functionality and user experience. Given that Core Web Vitals impact search engine results, boosting a site’s performance could lead to better rankings. 

So, why do websites often see a drop in traffic and rankings immediately after a migration? This happens because it can take time for search engines to understand the changes you’ve made to the site and update their indexes accordingly. 

Let’s go back to the idea of a brick-and-mortar business moving locations. It’s going to take time for the new audience to learn they are in their area, but when done well, they have their old and new audience to pull from.

Website Migration Checklist

Because website migrations can be so complex and challenging, it helps to have a checklist to follow. Organizations should use this comprehensive website migration checklist as a guide when migrating their websites and tick off each step as they go:

1. Plan and Preparation

You’re not going to be able to gauge how successful a migration is without knowing where you are starting from. As a result, the first area of focus for your migration strategy is a strong baseline report. Prior to migration, the baseline report covers items like:

• What current keyword rankings your pages have
• How much traffic the website is currently getting
• Relevant conversion data (what pages are highest-converting, etc.)
• Site speed
• Amount/percentage of indexed pages
• Any potential compatibility issues that need to be addressed

Start by installing a web analytics platform like Google Analytics 4 and then track these items for at least a couple of weeks. Brands can also use a tool like Ubersuggest to track their site’s rankings and monitor changes over time.

After your migration is completed, you can compare metrics to the baseline to ensure that the site is performing better than it did before. If not, something likely went wrong during the migration process, and your team will need to make adjustments.

With your baseline report in hand, you can start to determine where your site needs growth the most. The general goal of a site migration is to ultimately provide better:

• Web traffic
• User experience
• Time on site
• Leads
• Sales

Don’t get the background reason for a migration be confused with the goal. Does the site need to be transferred to an entirely new domain? Do you need a new CMS? Are you merging with another website? Are you moving subdomains to the root domain? These are all background reasons. 

The overall goal is to make sure that you retain and improve those metrics we laid out. You want to make sure addressing the background reason with a migration doesn’t damage your site’s existing success.

Your team needs to be as diligent as possible to make sure that doesn’t happen. That includes speaking to internal and external experts, such as IT professionals, SEOs, web developers, and analytics teams. Each group will have invaluable opinions and advice on how to get it right—but also can explain what can go wrong.

After outlining goals and objectives, the next step is to create a website migration plan that includes:

• A sensible budget
• A reasonable timeline
• The teams and their responsibilities

Having a clearly defined strategy is crucial and remember that most migrations don’t happen in a day. It’s a complex process with several moving parts requiring great communication between team members to succeed.

Cross-department teams have the best chance of success. System admins, developers, SEOs, designers, UX developers, copywriters, and other professionals will all contribute to a successful migration, so give everyone a seat at the table. With that said, agencies are also something you should consider adding to your migration team.

How Agencies Can Help With Your Migration Plan

Website migration budgets shouldn’t be unpalatably large, especially if teams have the necessary skills in-house. Nevertheless, you should consider hiring an agency, especially an SEO expert consultant to get added support when needed. Agency experts can help review your benchmark reports for any potential red flags that need to be addressed pre-migration.

Another area where an agency can support is promoting the new URL using email, digital PR, and social media to reach customers and the press. The more awareness built before launch, the smoother reclaiming your original traffic will be.

In cases where a migration is necessary due to a rebrand, organizations should create a page on the new domain as quickly as possible, establishing rank for the old brand name and new URL. Running paid search ads for the previous brand name can also limit traffic drops. As a result, you might want to consider an agency with paid media expertise to help mitigate the initial drops that can happen with migration.

2. Data Backup and Migration

While you might have a baseline team in place and even recruited a digital marketing agency to help, you can’t start the migration process just yet. The next step is making sure you have a comprehensive backup of the current website’s data, including: 

• Content
• Media files
• Databases
• User accounts
• Any other relevant information

This backup serves as a safety net, so data can be recovered and restored in case any errors or issues happen during the migration process. If you need to do a rollback for any reason, you’ll need the backup for that as well.

The next step here is building out a strategy to preserve the integrity, consistency and accuracy of this data. For example, are there any data dependencies, relationships, or transformations that may need to be addressed during the migration? This is the time to review and address these issues. Here are a few items for consideration.

• Backup and Restore Utilities: Most content management systems (CMS) and databases come with built-in backup and restore utilities that can be used to create complete backups of the website data, including content, user data, and configurations. 
• Database Migration Tools: These tools are specifically designed to migrate databases between different platforms or environments. 
• Code Migration Tools: Version control systems can be used to manage and track changes in code. They can also help with merging code changes, resolving conflicts, and managing deployment to different environments.
• Content Migration Tools: These tools are designed to migrate content, such as pages, posts, and media files, between different CMS platforms or versions. 
• Data Transformation and ETL Tools: In some cases, data may need to be transformed or restructured during the migration process. Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tools can help with this process.
• Scripting and Automation Tools: For more complex migrations or custom data transformations, scripting languages like Python, Ruby, or Bash can be used to write custom scripts or utilities. These scripts can automate various tasks, such as data extraction, transformation, and loading.

While this is a good baseline starting point, the data migration tools you need will depend on the nature of your site and scope of the migration. In all scenarios it is essential to thoroughly test and validate these tools before implementing them in a production environment. 

This likely involves running data integrity checks, performing sample audits, and conducting user acceptance testing to make sure that the migrated data is accurate and functional.

It’s also essential to document the data migration process thoroughly, including the steps taken, the tools used, any challenges encountered, and the resolutions implemented. We’ll talk a bit more about documentation later. 

The truth is, your migration might go flawlessly, and you never need to use your backups. But a rough migration with no backups could be a disaster for your business. A data migration & backup strategy helps ensure the continuity of operations and minimizes the risk of data loss or corruption.

3. Content Audit and Optimization

The vast majority of migrations will involve changing URLs. Because of this, you need to build a content map to get a complete picture of existing content. Creating a content map will also highlight existing errors like bad redirects, 5xx errors, and pagination issues that you can fix before migrating. 

Few organizations will want to migrate all URLs in their content map. That’s why migration experts, like the NP Digital team, recommend using the 6Rs to determine whether content should be:

• Reformat
• Repurpose
• Refresh
• Retire
• Redirect
• Remain

Pre-migration, a priority item to look at using this method is any content that’s outdated, redundant, or irrelevant. These pages should either be brought up to date, redirected to another page, or retired. If you think the page is worth keeping, prioritize optimizing the content for better user experience, SEO, and accessibility. 

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is arguably the best tool for creating a content map. It extracts all of a website’s URLs and finds broken links, errors, and redirects.

While effort should be made to account for every single page, this simply won’t be possible on very large sites. That’s why it’s important to prioritize efforts by focusing on pages that matter most. Typically, these will be pages that drive the most traffic or generate the most revenue.

301 redirect legacy URLs to the most relevant new page possible — and avoid redirecting a legacy URL to the homepage if you can. 

This will lead to a poor user experience, and Google has said that mass redirecting pages will result in soft 404 errors. If a relevant page doesn’t exist, consider creating a new page or removing the legacy URL altogether.

Brands should confirm the URL structure of their new site first, and then consider making changes to optimize the site’s technical SEO. Otherwise, brands risk mapping out content for URLs that get updated when the site goes live.

4. Redesign and Customization

If your website migration involves a major overhaul or complete redesign, the final product needs to align with your organization’s brand vision. This includes:

• New layout
• User interface
• Branding elements

Detail matters here. You need to make sure that your design properly communicates the brand values and resonates with the target audience. 

The redesign phase is also a good opportunity to work with a professional design agency or a team of experienced designers. Your team can collaborate with them to create a visually appealing and user-friendly interface. 

You don’t want to make these decisions in a vacuum, though. User testing is key to make sure that your actual audience will like the redesign. Stakeholders, clients, potential customers, everyone should have a chance to weigh in on potential redesigns to make sure it’s not only appealing, but meets their needs. It’s also more important than ever to incorporate accessibility features to ensure that the website is inclusive and easy to navigate for everyone.

Here are some other considerations that should go into the redesign stage:

• Integration. Seamless integration of the organization’s existing digital assets, such as logos, brand guidelines, and marketing collateral. This is especially important if you are changing the name of your business/products or merging with another business.
• Style guides. Reviewing the color scheme, typography, imagery, and overall aesthetic to ensure that they accurately represent the brand and evoke the desired emotional response from visitors.
• Design standards. Following modern design principles like intuitive navigation and optimized page layouts.
• Collaboration. Working with your development team to make sure that the redesign is visually appealing and technically sound across various devices and browsers.

5. Training and Documentation

As we mentioned earlier, a successful web migration is a collaborative process with many stakeholders, from content creators to developers to designers to administrators, and any agencies that you bring aboard. To facilitate a smooth transition and efficient management of the new website, there needs to be comprehensive training and documentation for all website stakeholders.

The goal of these training materials should be covering the new website’s functionality, any changes to the CMS, and any other relevant tools or platforms. These materials should include step-by-step guides, video tutorials, and best practices for creating, editing, and publishing content on the new website. 

You should also prep to provide training sessions or workshops to allow team members to ask questions and gain hands-on experience with the new system. Remember, it’s going to take time for your team to get up to speed on the changes. Make sure that you consider offering ongoing support and refresher training sessions to make sure that everyone in your organization fully understands how to use the new site.

Equally important as the quality of the documentation is how it is distributed. Whatever mediums you choose, they need to be comprehensive, well-structured, and easily accessible to all relevant parties. 

Consider creating a centralized knowledge base or wiki where team members can access the documentation, share their learnings, and collaborate on improving the resources over time. These are great because if anything changes post-migration, these hubs can be easily edited to reflect the most up-to-date information.

Documentation also plays a key role when it comes to responsibility. Make sure that you keep rigorous track of every step, testing session, and strategy shift during the migration. This ensures that if something goes wrong at a later stage, it’s easier for your team to look back at these records and discover what went wrong.

6. Testing and Quality Assurance

Migrating a website is like buying a new car—a test drive is mandatory. A thorough test in a closed environment will help brands identify errors or issues that, if unaddressed, could cause havoc with the new site’s UX or traffic when the full migration goes live.

Testing the migration in a closed environment is important for several reasons:

• Changes won’t impact the live site.
• Business operations aren’t interrupted as the old site remains live and functioning.
• Brands can use the old site as a reference point.
• Changes can be reverted if something goes wrong.

The type of migration will determine when organizations can start testing. For redesigns, testing can begin as soon as the new site is developed, for example. And, in general, the earlier testing begins, the better. The earlier issues get noticed, the more time there will be to address them.

Ideally, you want to be able to modify your closed environment to emulate as many settings as possible, including different devices, browsers, and general conditions. This makes sure that the migration meets your expectations for as many users as possible.

But what should those expectations be? Migration tests should evaluate several factors, including:

• Site architecture
• Usability
• Mobile responsiveness
• Metadata
• Internal linking
• Search functionality and other site features

Before starting, brands must block search engines from accessing and indexing the site. Password protection for the test website is the best option, but alternatively, brands can block crawling via a robots.txt directive and add a noindex tag to every page. Both options will keep Google from indexing the site

Remember, this is a team effort. Utilize multiple team members from different departments to test the migration so nothing gets missed.

7. Launch and Monitoring

Execution is the name of the game during this final stage of the website migration process—and speed is essential. The longer a site remains offline, the higher the chance rankings and traffic will drop. 

Make sure timelines account for downtime, website functionality, and content integrity — three of the most important factors for digital marketers in our survey.

For example, it’s best to schedule migrations during periods of low traffic (such as late at night) to limit the number of affected visitors. Brands can also schedule their migration during their slow season, for example a SaaS brand might see a drop-off in performance during the holidays.

The migration process isn’t over once the new site is live. Brands must track their migration’s success against the benchmarked measurements collected in stage 1 and improve where needed.

It’s normal to see a change (and quite possibly a decrease) in traffic and rankings following a migration, but a significant and long-term drop can signify bigger issues, usually because of bad redirection practices. 

Track the legacy site’s traffic and rankings. These should gradually drop to zero over the year. If not, double-check to see if the pages still receiving traffic are being redirected.

Finally, it’s important that you review user feedback. Even if your site post-migration meets your internal metrics, users may have their own concerns or problems. You might want to take these with a grain of salt – after all, change can be hard – but if you see patterns in feedback, that’s when you want to look further.

Tracking can stop after a year if everything is in order.

Type-Specific Migration Steps

The items we covered above are things that will fit with just about any web migration, whether you’re doing a migration across platforms or as a part of a rebrand. But with that said, there are going to be some additional steps you may need to work in depending on what type of migration you’re doing. Let’s take a closer look.

• Re-platforming: Upgrading your CMS to a new platform is one of the most common migrations. It also typically includes the most moving parts. Some of the most important unique parts of a re-platforming migration include, but are not limited to: creating a 301 redirect map, pointing your DNS to the new site, updating your server provider if necessary, and reimplementation of all tracking software and 3rd party scripts.

• Site consolidation: There are times when it’s in your organic strategy’s best interest to consider migrating off-domain content onto your domain. Whether it’s folding a blog subdomain into your main domain or retiring some outdated owned domains or sub-domains, this will help funnel users and search engines to your fresh content that drive site authority and revenue. Generally, to execute this migration type, you need to 404 pages that have no value across channels, and 301 redirect everything else that has value. Similar to re-platforming, a 301 redirect map can help you stay organized here.

• Acquired domains: Companies acquiring the intellectual and web properties of other companies will often find themselves needing to fold content from the acquired domains into their own. This migration process usually involves identifying the gaps in content the current site could fill from the acquired site. Placing that content on the existing site and 301 redirecting the acquired pages to their new home will transfer as much existing link equity as possible. It will also be critical to carve time out for planning ahead to avoid duplicate content.

• Significant brand update: What happens if you’re making any large changes to branding and brand identity? These can include migration steps from any of the above items. It’s ultimately going to depend on what you are looking to accomplish during your migration to have a better-performing and easier-to-navigate site.

Migration Challenges: What Are Marketers Focusing On?

Migrations aren’t easy, but they aren’t as difficult as organizations might expect. Most (38 percent) marketers rate the difficulty of their migration as three out of five. One-quarter (25.2 percent) rate it easier than a three, and 36.8 percent rate it as either a four or a five. 

For many, the largest challenge during the website migration was maintaining website functionality and user experience. Almost one in five said the hardest challenge was ensuring website functionality and content integrity, and 18.8 percent said it was preserving search engine rankings and traffic.

What To Expect From A Website Migration

Unfortunately, preserving traffic and rankings isn’t always possible. 

Over one-third of the marketers in our survey saw a significant drop in traffic immediately after the migration. Most saw traffic levels return, but 11.2 percent of marketers said traffic levels never returned. One in five saw a significant drop in rankings, with just 6.8 percent reporting that rankings never recovered. 

Traffic can take several months to return to pre-migration levels. One-third (33.5 percent) of respondents said it took three to four months for traffic to reach pre-migration levels, with another third saying it took one to two months. One in five reported that it took five months or more. 

Why the difference in the numbers? Website size can be a contributing factor in how long it takes to recover traffic levels, with larger sites taking longer. Delays can also be caused by issues like broken redirects or lost external links.

Faster returns to pre-migration traffic levels can correspond to performance upgrades that come off the back of a migration. Brands that migrate to a faster hosting provider or CMS platform may see higher rankings and an increase in traffic that counterbalances the negative impact of the migration. 

Satisfaction is generally high as a result. Overall, 40 percent of the digital marketers in the survey were very satisfied, 39 percent were somewhat satisfied and only 12 percent were somewhat dissatisfied or dissatisfied.

Example of Successful Website Migration

A website migration is a huge undertaking, but can do a lot for a business. That’s why so many website owners seek help from digital marketing agencies like NP Digital. That was the case for Verint, a global customer engagement software and analytics company. Verint helps the world’s most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data, and experiences across the enterprise. 

The Challenge

Verint had a major site migration, a blog subdomain migration, and several acquired business unit migrations to perform. We needed to ensure the migrations went smoothly, we were also tasked with improving the site experience and increasing the amount of organic search traffic.

However, Verint was also aware of the competitive space, so they had one final request: as part of the migration, NP Digital was to audit and optimize content to increase non-branded traffic to the new site.

The Solution

NP Digital closely partnered with the Verint product and marketing teams to develop a holistic SEO strategy as a part of their website migration. Our efforts encompassed in-depth research, targeted content development, the implementation of technical SEO best practices, and digital PR.

What did this look like exactly?

It was a multi-step process that included:

• Identifying, prioritizing, and implementing technical fixes to help Core Web Vitals and other site performance issues.
• Identifying and fixing several unnecessary redirects and duplicate content issues.
• Identifying and implementing language and website localization best practices.

The NP Digital team provided SEO resources for developers and also implemented the 6Rs Audit recommendations to optimize existing content.

Once the migration was complete, NP Digital monitored rankings, traffic, and 404 activity. The team also developed new content ideation clusters to support key themes and audiences identified during the research process.

The Results

So, was Verint’s migration successful?

Undeniably so.

Within 30 days of launch, Verint saw a:

• 210 percent increase in non-branded organic search clicks year-over-year.
• 33 percent increase in total number of keywords ranked in positions 1 through 10 year-over-year.
• 32 percent increase in total clicks coming from organic search year-over-year.

The success didn’t stop there. Verint continues to see year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter growth. Just take a look at the results for non-brand clicks Q3 2023 versus Q3 2022:

This just goes to show how beneficial a properly executed website migration can be for your domain.

Frequently Asked Questions About Website Migrations

How long does a website migration take?

It can take less than an hour to execute a migration but months to plan the entire move, depending on the size and complexity of the website.

How much does a website migration cost?

A website migration for a small site shouldn’t cost more than $15,000. However, larger or more complex sites (like enterprise sites or e-commerce stores with many pages) can cost much more. Any rebranding or redesign costs will be in addition to the migration.

How do I prepare for a website migration?

There are several things you can do to prepare for a migration. Create a timeline and a migration team, assign a budget, and create a content map of your entire site.

What software do you need for website migrations?

You will need a website crawler, an analytics tool, and a keyword rankings tracker to migrate your website.

What are the benefits of migrating content?

If you have content on your website pre-migration, then the greatest benefits to website content migration include maintaining and increasing search engine rankings and driving organic traffic to your newly migrated website.

What are key considerations when migrating content?

When migrating content, you need to consider what your content goals are post-migration and whether the content you’re migrating will serve those goals. If it won’t, you might want to consider reformatting, refreshing, or retiring that content. For the content you will definitely migrate, you must put redirects in place.

How can I ensure my SEO ranking isn't affected by the migration?

No brand can guarantee the security of its SEO rankings during a website migration, but organizations can do a few things to mitigate damage. This includes creating a detailed content map and redirecting all pages to a relevant new URL. Brands should also block robots access to the new website during development and testing.

Will my website traffic be affected by my website migration?

A website migration can disrupt traffic levels, but several strategies can reduce the impact, including:

Creating pages on the new domain that target the previous URL and branding

Building a detailed content map and redirecting all pages to a relevant new page

Keeping the URL structure as similar as possible

Heavily promoting the new website prior to migration

What happens to my backlinks if my URLs change?

A site migration shouldn’t affect backlinks if brands correctly 301 redirect existing web pages to relevant pages on the new domain with a similar URL structure. Issues can happen, however, if every page is redirected to the homepage. If there are no redirects, then organizations will lose any backlinks to the old domain.

Is a CMS migration the same thing as a website migration?

A CMS migration is a type of website migration where brands change the back-end technology that powers their websites. The domain and URL structure will stay the same during a CMS migration, but these elements could change during a full site migration.

Conclusion

A website migration may seem daunting, but that shouldn’t make organizations hesitate. Better brand awareness, long-term traffic improvements, and better rankings are on the horizon.

It’s straightforward to mitigate risks, too. By reading up on website redesign best practices and following the steps this article outlines, brands should be in a good place to avoid drops in traffic or rankings.

Trusted third parties can ensure long-term success, too. Almost two-thirds of the marketers in our survey worked with a professional agency or consultant and over half would work with an agency or consultant in the future. To experience a migration like Verint, book a free consultation with the NP Digital team today.