

It’s important that search engines do no crawl or index staging site pages. During a website migration, staging sites see a significant amount of work.

Staging Site Pages May Get IndexedĪ staging site is a hidden “test” version of a website. This will ensure the proper planning is in place and someone is following up on the changes and measuring their impact over time. Many people may carry experience in this space (CMO, VP Marketing, Director of SEO) but someone must be in charge of spearheading this project. The resources needed to fix an unplanned site migration far outweighs the cost of advice from an agency or internal resources before the migration takes place. Keeping your core web vitals in check helps for crawling and ranking but also keeps your users from bouncing in frustration. There is nothing worse than being jolted all over a page as elements load in, or the dreaded fat finger click on mobile. It is important to inspect these pages and make sure there aren’t any major mobile usability issues and see how they impact core web vitals. While those redesigned pages may look stunning, there may be issues that arise from how Google’s crawlers view and index the pages. A 302 redirect tells Google this is a temporary redirect, which would not be the scenario in this instance. Line up those most important pages and redirect to the URL with that content, if you are completely removing a post redirect to the most relevant page on the site.Īnother issue that could arise here is the use of 302 redirects instead of 301. The first is the use of 301 redirects to send multiple pages to the homepage, creating a very confused user who is searching for the answer to a long tail informational query and getting redirected to the home page. 302 – A temporary redirect to a new pageĪ couple of different things can go wrong here.301 – A permanent redirect to a new page.404 – Users clicking on a link to a page that no longer exists.This will result in lower rankings, a higher bounce rate, less time on site, and ultimately a negative impact on the bottom line. Nothing speaks to a poor user experience like a 404 error or a redirect with no contextual relevance. When users click on a link to a page that no longer exists, it triggers a 404 error. This can help determine which pages may be removed and the impact it will have on overall traffic. This is a good time to audit and see which pages bring in quality traffic and which don’t. Using Google Analytics, site owners should understand their top traffic-driving pages and their corresponding goal completions. Quality over quantity can make a big difference when Google crawls and indexes your pages, which can lead to higher rankings. Multiple pages could combine to make one bigger page covering a primary keyword along with secondary keywords around that topic.Īccording to Orbit Media, 7.5 million blog posts are published every day. Here are some of the symptoms of a poor website migration plan: After you work on a few website migrations, you start to notice common challenges. Quite a few things can go wrong during a website migration. Other changes like design and CMS can have less of a traffic drop if executed properly. For example, even a perfectly planned migration will see traffic dips from a domain name change. Migrations will have different impacts on performance. While some of these changes may seem small, they can have an extreme impact on a website’s rankings and traffic without the proper plan in place. What Is A Website Migration?Ī website migration is an umbrella term for a site undergoing significant changes via CMS, content, design, or structure. That’s why when you change a content management system (CMS) or merge two websites under one domain, it’s important to have a website migration plan that prevents traffic loss. It takes precious time and resources to grow organic search visibility. Your website is the very center of your digital marketing presence.
