What do you want to change? Who will be impacted by the migration? There is a significant difference between moving some content within the site and redesigning the site from A to Z. We saw at the beginning of the article that migration can take many forms. The more ambitious a migration is, the more changes it involves, the riskier it is, and the more resources it requires.
Build a project team . You need to include everyone who will be impacted by the site migration in the team. This generally includes: site administrators (webmasters), developers, designers, editors, project managers, SEO experts, legal teams, and management. Schedule a kick-off meeting with all of these people to inform everyone. You need to designate a project manager in charge of leading the migration (this can be an SEO expert, but not necessarily).
Identify your goals . Ask everyone involved in the project what their concerns, expectations, and challenges are regarding the migration. Ask them what they believe are the main success criteria for the migration. This is part of the fundamental work of defining goals. If you don't set goals up front, you won't be able to determine downstream whether the migration is a success or a failure.
Explain the risks involved and what to expect . You need to oman whatsapp data educate your team on the risks involved in the migration, especially in terms of SEO. You need to inform them about the likely loss of traffic in the first few months, the whys and wherefores.
Map out the tasks . Make a list of what you need to do before, during, and after your website migration. Assign the tasks to the right people. This is where a checklist can come in handy. We’ll have a chance to come back to this. You can use a Spreadsheet or a collaborative tool like Trello to manage the schedule and assign tasks.
Choose the right time to launch the project . Avoid launching the project right before a holiday period or during a rush period. Don't launch the project on a Friday just because it would be a good way to end the week! Tuesday or Wednesday are good days to launch a project, because Monday is often taken up by meetings and that leaves two or three days before the weekend to fix bugs at the start.
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Step #2 – Pre-migration preparation
The “pre-migration” stage is important. As its name suggests, it consists of preparing everything you will need during the project. This stage is the bulk of the work. Here are the main milestones:
Define SEO specifications
If the site migration involves a design overhaul or a change of CMS, make sure to clearly define the SEO specifications for developers. Here are some examples of points to clarify:
The structure of URLs.
Meta information: Titles and Meta Description.
The body of content of the pages and the Hn titles.
XML sitemaps.
Structured data ( Schema.org ) .
Page loading time.
There would be a lot to say on all these subjects, but it would require an article as such. Many of these subjects have also been addressed in the articles of La Fabrique du Net. We invite you to refer to them.
Evaluate the design
If the migration involves a design overhaul, have the potential impact of the change assessed on SEO. Ask the SEO expert on the team. This is an important point. Design dictates if and where content and links are positioned – and this has a potentially massive impact on SEO strategy.
For example, the designer may not consider it necessary to include body content in the category pages. From a design point of view, this is understandable, but from an SEO point of view, it is quite problematic. We advise you to involve SEO experts from the website design phase.
Inventory of site contents
When you migrate, it is important to know what content will be impacted. You must list all the content on your site to get a complete view. To do this, you can use analytics software to identify all the pages that generate traffic ( Google Analytics for example) or export the list of all pages from your CMS. Also, don't forget the images, which are also content on your site.