When you launch a new website for your business, initially, you never plan about website migrations. But, there can be various reasons to think about website migration service when you want to make substantial modifications to your pages. This can include changing the content management system on your website or launching a new digital marketing tool. Some companies often go for site migrations when they want to switch from HTTP to HTTPs. You may also think about migrating your website or all URLs while selecting a new domain for your business.
It is not necessary that every strategy regarding web site migration will positively impact on the traffic and search engine ranking for your business. Hence, there can be situations when site migration could fail and you have to think about some strategies to overcome them.
I have also followed numerous websites to see how the migration works and the reasons behind its failure. Many leading businesses blame the search engine optimization professionals for the shortcomings in website migration. But, if you ask my point of view, I would suggest some key aspects to think about:
- Why does the site migration process fail?
- Which domain migration steps went wrong and caused failure?
- How to prepare your migration checklists to make sure website migration doesn’t fail?
So, to explain all these aspects, I would like to discuss the four reasons that can act as a blockage in the path of web site migration.
Reasons to Blame for Failure of Website Migration
If you are experiencing any technical issue while performing website migrations, it can happen due to these top reasons.
1. Lack of Knowledge on Website Migration
For successful web site migration, proper knowledge of this technique and planning is a must. When I decided to migrate my website, I researched about the scope of this migration and how it can benefit my business.
Next, I prepared a server migration checklist that consists of my business objective, type of migration I prefer and other website development strategies. Your goal should be implementing such strategies that can offer minimal visibility loss for websites.
If you are appointing SEO professionals offering website migration service without weighing the scope and objectives of your business, it can result in a decrease in organic traffic and online ranking. Hence, you need to prepare a team that can put together all the best methods of site migration and implements them.
While picking your team of experts, make sure that they are having enough information on website migrating techniques. If not, you can educate them about the strategies involved in the migration or go for outsourcing site migration services.
2. Not Calculating the Risks During the Migration
I had to go through many challenges while migrating my first website. So, while applying the processes for website migration, there can be too many risks involved. When the SEO strategies hit rock bottom, it can affect the ranking of your business. Hence, applying any wrong strategy while migrating your site can eliminate your old rankings.
If this happens to your website, there is no way you can get a valid explanation from the search engines. So, it’s better to discuss the risks while migrating websites before applying them in practice. You can conduct workshops or seminars on website migration to educate the website development team. Make sure that the necessary guidelines regarding the migration risks can reach your developers, SEO experts, project managers, copywriters, management and other departments in your organization.
I also performed some risk assessment before site migration for my business. Since your entire business can be at stake, take preparation for the following risks to overcome them when website migration fails.
- Bad user experience on a website or web pages
- Loss of content or issues in the CMS software
- Website downtime a bit lengthy
- Lower conversion rate and indexation count
- Too many broken links in the content
- A sudden drop in organic traffic
3. Average Professionals to Migrate Your Website
You can come across such site migration risks if there are no certified web developers in your team. When you pick a random web developer for website migration, they may end up lower your business’s rankings and reputation in the market. Hence, it’s mandatory to select professionals who will have enough knowledge and expertise for lowering the risks.
To reduce the effect of all these migration risks, you must calculate the after-effects. Pay attention to the strategies that can restore your website’s ranking through organic search. If any of the content is broken or missing, you need to provide new links or pages immediately.
Somehow, if certain digital marketing strategies aren’t working anymore, try to replace them with new ideas. Carefully, handle the 301 redirects,404 pages and avoid restoring of broken or expired URLs on your website.
If too many modifications are needed for migrating a website, its best to get a new domain and start fresh. However, you should never ignore the risks of domain switching and take help from the SEO professionals for restoring business.
4. Poor Migration Checklist
Don’t forget to create proper backups for everything on your website before beginning the migration process. I can be a major issue while migrating your website if you don’t have the original content. Also, go through the migration list prepared by your team. It might be the case that certain tools are missing and hence, website migration is failing.
You should be careful about a few things while preparing your site migration checklist:
Content
When you migrate your website, always evaluate the point of differences between the old and new content. If you have huge traffic on your previous site, try to retain the format that the visitors prefer to see.
Redirects
Make sure that the URL mapping is done correctly for your migrated website. If you are providing redirected links, double-check that they are not broken or misplaced.
Technical Aspect
Certain things have to be appropriate while going for website migration. So, set your canonical URLs, robots directives, hreflang attributes, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, etc. for migrating your website successfully.
I hope this article has provided some useful information on the top 4 reasons behind website migrations failure and tips to overcome them. You can research on remaining issues and risks involved with site migration before implementing it in your business. It’s always better to calculate the pros and cons before going for website migration.