A Brief Guide to Website Migration: What, Why And How
If you have a website that your business depends on for revenue generation and growth, maintaining it consistently should be your top prerogative.
While most potential issues or errors can be fixed by simple patches or updates to the website, some require you to consider an overhaul. And this overhaul is often in the form of CMS migration or a similar major step that will impact your website performance and everything related to it.
Let us start with the definition of website migration, before we delve deeper into the ins and outs of the process.
What is Website Migration?
A website migration generally refers to the process of shifting your website from one CMS to another, and may also include changes in domain, and structural changes in the website. The process of website migration is considered one of the most significant alterations you can make to your website, which is why you have to be careful with it.
Any errors or mistakes in the process can lead to loss of data or other structural errors in the newly migrated website. As an immediate effect, a migration will impact the traffic flow, search engine performance, and its overall performance.
When To Consider Website Migration
Now that you know what website migration is, you may have a basic idea of what the process involves and the kind of risks you would have to face by carrying it out. While you may have myriad reasons for migrating your website, here are some of the most common situations in which you might want to consider going through this arduous process:
To Optimize Performance
As a website owner, you would want to optimize your website performance at regular intervals so that you can maintain a consistently positive user experience and engagement on your website. Having performance issues such as slow loading times, or error-laden pages might lead to:
Decreased user satisfaction
Increased bounce rates
Reduced Conversions
Lower Traffic
If you are facing any of these issues, you may want to consider migrating your website to a new platform so that you can optimize it for speed, scalability and reliability. While you can consider quick fixes on your website to address some of the performance issues, if they persist for a long time, you should consider migrating to a better platform.
To Upgrade Platform
Sometimes, everything might be working fine with your website, but you may just be in the dire need of a platform upgrade. This is more common than you think, and if it is the natural next step for your website, you should be open to exploring that option.
In other cases, you might want to relocate your website to a new domain or switch the hosting providers or server locations. In these situations, you must consider upgrading your current platform to a better one. So, if you are using Umbraco for your website right now and it is no longer serving its purpose properly, you might want to consider an Umbraco to WordPress migration.
To Redesign or Rebrand
Maybe your overall site and URL structure are not posing any kind of issues for your website. Even then, if you are planning rebranding of your website, or any major alterations in your website design, you will want to consider a website migration. However, you should remember that major alterations especially in the form of a website migration might totally change your on-page elements.
A lot of these changes might hamper the progress you have already made in defining your website performance, and some of them might even compromise your SEO performance. These side-effects take a long time to undo or correct, and might require quite a bit of time and resources.
How to Carry Out Website Migration Effectively
Now that you know what website migration is, and when is the right time to consider going through the process for your website, let us now look at how you can navigate the migration process effectively.
There are essentially three stages in a typical website migration that you should know about:
1. Planning Stage
For any major project of a magnitude similar to a website migration, setting the stage is the most crucial step in the process. When you are in the planning stage of a website migration, you want to define the scope and objectives associated with the migration, and pinpoint the key stakeholders of the project.
You should also utilize the planning stage to set down the metrics and benchmarks you want to achieve through the migration, and the timelines and milestones associated with the process.
2. Development Stage
The second stage in a website migration process is the development stage where all the important steps that determine its success are carried out. The development stage should essentially start with taking an inventory of all the content assets that are to be migrated from the current website to the new one.
The development stage will also include creating a backlink profile, a database of all the crucial URLs, and other essential checks. Together, these activities should come together and ensure that your migrated website works smoothly without any issues. Essentially, if this stage is successful, you can consider the website migration to be a success too.
3. Monitoring and Reporting Stage
The third and final stage is the monitoring and reporting stage, where you essentially determine whether the transition is a success. In this stage, you essentially want to run periodic and consistent monitoring mechanisms and checks on your newly migrated website. In this stage, you want to monitor the overall performance of your website as well as identify and address any persisting issues that may hamper your user experience.
You also want to track the traffic and analytics on the new website, and carry out an SEO audit to measure the SEO performance so that you can create detailed reports based on the insights. It is also a good idea to update your robots.txt configurations regularly, as well as to document all the insights and data that you generate through your monitoring and testing mechanisms.
Concluding Remarks
Website migrations are important and complicated depending on the magnitude at which you are carrying out. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to have an organized process for carrying out the website migration so that you can prevent any kind of data loss, as well as other data or security risks.