Is SEO Important to Consider for Site Migrations?

What is a site migration?

A site migration involves making significant changes to the design and/or structure of a website. When performed successfully, it can result in improved site performance and enhanced user experience.

Types of migrations include:

• Moving to a new CMS – Moving from your existing CMS to a new one, like WordPress or Shopify. Or even moving to the newer version of your CMS.
• Website redesign – Major changes to the aesthetic, layout, or code.
• Changes to your site’s architecture – Restructuring how pages are organised.
• Implementing HTTPS – Moving to the secure version of HTTP.
• Changing your domain name – If you’re going through a rebrand, you’ll need to move the content from the old site to your new site.
• Top-level domain change – Changing the website TLD, e.g. .co.uk, .com, .org.

Or often a combination of the above. Given this, it’s important that everyone is aligned about what kind of migration is being performed. Depending on the type of migration, your level of SEO support needed will vary.

Why is it important to consider SEO? 

As an agency, we come across many clients who have recently migrated or are even in the middle of one with no SEO support, usually they’re unaware that it even needs to be considered. So why is it vital to think about SEO when migrating? 

Mitigate the loss of rankings and traffic

The main reason for considering SEO support is to avoid losing all the value from your previous SEO efforts, meaning you don’t lose important rankings and traffic.

Normally during a site migration with SEO support included, there is still often an initial drop in traffic (sources report between 5-30%), with the expectation that this will be recovered. This is because it takes search engines time to crawl and understand the changes that have been made.

However, if there is no SEO support in place when migrating, you could expect to lose up to 80% of traffic – and this isn’t easy and simple to regain back.

Don’t hinder future SEO value

There’s a common misconception that if you haven’t put any active efforts into SEO before, there isn’t much to lose, but you could still have built up some SEO value on your site without knowing and without considering the risk of having to start from zero again.

Ensuring your migration takes into consideration SEO at every step will limit time spent post-migration, having to fix all the issues that have occurred but could have been avoided with proper SEO support. This also means you’ll have to put other key optimisation efforts on hold to focus on these issues instead, further setting your organic presence back.

SEO is a long-term strategy, so why prolong the process when you could start seeing a return from your SEO sooner, had you mitigated these risks with proper SEO support in place.

Fix aspects where there hasn’t been time before

A migration is also an opportunity to put right some past bad practices or to update your site so that it is more in line with your current brand and services.

For example, amending URL structures where subfolders are no longer relevant when a new, better alternative could be implemented instead. Another example is reviewing your blog content – is it all still relevant or needed now?

These are the types of changes where the effort involved may not have seemed worth it in the past for the return, but as you are changing other aspects of your site now, you may as well sort these out, too.

Impacts of no SEO support

Without proper site migration support, websites are at risk of significant SEO and performance issues, including:

• Loss of organic search rankings and traffic – Losing key ranking positions will result in a loss of vital traffic to the site. This can then result in a drop in organic sales and activity.
• Misconfigured redirects – Redirects may not be implemented, set to the wrong page and cause redirect chains or redirect loops, creating a poor experience as users can’t find the content they’re looking for.
• Implementing changes that could impact user experience or crawlability – For example, a new site architecture that hurts user experience and impacts how search engines understand and navigate your site.
• Technical errors that prevent search engines from properly crawling and indexing – You could experience pages being removed from search engine results pages, reducing visibility.
• Loss of data – If analytics tracking isn’t properly carried over, it will make it difficult to measure the impact of the migration.

Proper migration support from an agency like Yawn will help you avoid these pitfalls, protecting your organic visibility and laying the groundwork for future growth.

Key SEO Actions that should be taken

Below are some of the essential SEO actions that should be taken when performing a site migration:

• Crawling and comparing the current website and staging website.
• Auditing the staging site to ensure it is technically sound and that all content is in place, ready for launch.
• Creating a redirect strategy (arguably the most important task) to make sure any old URLs are redirected to the new equivalent to avoid loss of value.

These elements are in addition to all the various technical, on-page and off-page checks that your SEO-er will undertake to ensure a smooth migration.

During the site migration, you may also take the opportunity to tackle additional optimisations, such as:

• A content review – Whilst not essential, a migration is a great opportunity to review the content on your site to see what to keep, remove or consolidate.
• Copywriting – If you are looking to create new pages or consolidate pages on the new site, you may want help creating this content in addition to standard site migration support.
• Technical fixes – You could use this as a chance to improve certain technical elements, such as improved structured data for richer search results or to fix site speed issues.

Additional Considerations

Alignment between all parties

Ensure all parties are aligned during the migration process – this means making sure that developers, designers and marketing agencies are in regular contact as their tasks will likely depend on one another. It also helps them understand the importance of each other’s roles, saving you more work in the long run.

Plan ahead and be organised

Make sure the migration is well-planned and that there is someone in place to lead and manage progress. With so many steps that need to be taken for each party involved, it’s important that the migration plan takes this into account. What tasks can’t be done until x, y, z have been completed? Being aware of this from the start will help to keep the migration on track.

Prepare for Plan B

In my experience, I have rarely seen a migration that has launched the day it was initially set to go live. This is often the case as there are a lot of parties and moving parts in a migration, meaning there are things to consider that you weren’t able to account for at the start. This doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be due dates for different phases of a migration to work towards, but it’s worth being aware that a launch may need to be delayed to ensure all the necessary work has been completed for a successful launch. It’s better to delay launch rather than launch with a half-completed migration, which causes additional work later.

Level of SEO Support

Your available resources, budget, site size and type of migration will all influence the level of SEO support you need or can afford.

At Yawn, we offer three plans of migration support:

• Basic – These are the minimum required steps to ensure the migration is technically functional and the core structure is maintained.
• Standard – This plan offers improved risk mitigation and basic SEO alignment.
• Premium – This plan focuses more on future-proofing with a more advanced analysis of the current and new site.

Get in touch to discuss your requirements further, we will help advise which level of support would be the most appropriate based on your situation.

Alternatively, if you’ve recently gone through a site migration and have suffered from a loss in visibility and traffic, we can help you recover those losses.