First, let us understand what website migration is? As the name suggests migrating means moving things from one domain to another domain. It is kind of like relocating to a new place or shifting to a new house. You will be packing all your belongings in a box and then shift to the new place.

While shifting your website, you might end up losing most of your data wherein you have spentquite a lot of time, effort, and money in building your website. It might have cost you a fortune in payingto your web developer and designer for designing a site; or even spent much to a photographer for images and videos; or a professional in SEO. So, you will have totake an extracautious while and make sure that you don’t lose your organic traffic while migrating.

It is not only about uploading a new website or replacing and deleting the old one. It involves quite a lot of work and risks too. So, you will need to have proper team planning and SEO specialists for a successful migration.

Guide to migration so that you can avoid certain SEO and UX disaster

If customers feel like you not considering their experience, this is where you will lose traffic and end up risking business revenue.It is a huge job, and it is a single most aspect of launching your website. It can have a considerable impact on your ranking and traffic so let us look at the following steps one by one

Redesigning decision – You have to ensurethat you do not repeat your earlier mistakes, which were due to time and financial constraints. Plan and make a strategy for the repair element. You need to focus on UI/UX first as what the impact will be with the new design. Remember that you might want to fix only a small part for your users and not a whole lot. A very new experience or redesigning might even create some technical problem. So, you would surely want to avoid such trouble if you have less time.

As a result, this new look might become difficult for SEO to crawl, index, in ranking your webpage. Your links might also be lost. But in case if you happen to make quite a lot of changes, then you need to inform and update your SEO which needs to be done simultaneously.

Understanding the problem – Try to figure out and understand wherein was the problem in your initial design? Was there a difficulty in your navigation button, or missing some features or was it a poor architecture? If you are well aware of such problems, it becomes easier and faster to fix the issue. Through your data and analytics, you can use an approach.

Try to figure out which pages had a problem and has less been used by users. What problem were your users facing while browsing the pages?If you can find out such issues, you can keep your SEO objectives intact such as: Retaining your organic traffic, rank improvements, increase conversions of customers to lead, etc. 

SEO and UX–Maintaining a balance between SEO and UX is crucial if you are redesigning it. With the new look of your website, users may take time to adapt to it, and you may find a decrease in organic traffic. If you have stuffed too many keywords, your users may get confused, and SEO may not take you them to the right webpage. That will reduce your conversion rate.

To avoid such a struggle, you can first focus on UX, and then you can sit and audit for on-page SEO and other factors such as relevant and smart keyword and also a quick load time. You can also build trust with Google, such as having “About us” tabs and privacy policy terms.

Content Strategy– If you are thinking of new content, then you need to sit and plan it out with your writing team and understand and figure out the advantages and disadvantage of the new content. The users should be comfortable with the language, and at the same time, Google search should be able to crawl bots and interpret information for indexing your page.

You will also need to examine and access the content strategy with your new design before relaunching it. Keep in mind that if you are writing only for SEO, Google will penalize you. On the other hand, if you are writing only for readers failing to follow the optimizing technique, then you will lose yourself in the Google search engine (SERP). So, you need to write in such a way so that it is beneficial for your visitors as well as it meets the criteria of SEO technique.

Checking and testing out the new design – Once you aredone with your redesign, set out your team of testers and get it checked. You need to plan and make a strategy for your testing process. Check out all the internal links, overall navigation buttons across browsers.

Success metrics – Just before launching check out and determine if your site is successful. Consider the following factors such as:

Website presentation - New keyword rankings, organic traffic, user habits, conversion rates, crawling bots, and errors, indexing, and backlinks data.

Launch date – Once you are done with your testing, you need to determine and set a launch date. Do not forget to set yourself a buffer time to deal with any sorts of UX/ UI issues while migrating. Technical issues bring in a lot of challenges and can be dangerously notorious, leaving you clueless with its problems.

It is best to seek help from an SEO company while relaunching. Redesigning and migrating the platform is a complicated process, but at the same time, it could be rewarding too. It might boost up your ranking and increase organic traffic also. The primary benefit is in protecting your investments and make your presence visible to the Google search result page.