When rebranding online, you may need to complete a website migration, which can be a time-consuming and potentially tedious process.
In this blog post, Monique De Leon, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, gives you some guidance on website migrations, transfers, and rebrands to help you succeed in your efforts. Let’s get into it!
What You’ll Learn
- How to Define Web Migrations, Transfers and Rebranding
- 3 Key Steps for Pre-Migration Planning
- How to Complete the Migration Process
- Post-Migration Checklist to Secure Your Site
- How to Effectively Rebrand Online
My Expert Opinion
Moving over to a new domain with successful transfers and total rebranding efforts can be challenging, but the right approach will simplify this process and make it easier for future migrations.
When migrating and rebranding a website, the key is making the transition as seamless as possible. Through proper pre-migration preparation, planning your new domain ahead of the transfer, and post-migration finalization, you’ll be able to make this entire process painless.
I suggest you map out your new site plans well ahead of the migration and create checklists to keep the transfer smooth throughout. This approach can mean the difference between an efficient migration and a clunky, incomplete attempt.
To help you succeed, let’s go through the entire process with some clear guidance on how to proceed.
Understanding Website Migration, Website Transfers and Rebranding
First, consider what website migrations are and how they factor into transfers and rebranding.
Website Migration
A website migration is similar to other types of migrations – it typically entails moving a website from one location to another online. In terms of SEO, migration refers to any significant change to your site that can affect search engines’ ability to index and rank it, such as a transition to a new hosting platform or your website’s user experience.
Website Transfer
Meanwhile, website transfers are frequently part of the migration process, entailing moving content and various assets from one web domain to another. If you plan to switch to a new domain, you’ll likely undergo a transfer.
Website Rebranding
When migrating your website, you may also engage in website rebrands, which will alter visuals and other elements of your website to reflect any changes you’re making to your brand, from your logos and color schemes to your messaging, voice, and offerings. If you want to change your business model or simply revamp your brand, you’ll likely complete an online rebrand as part of this process.
3 Key Steps for Pre-Website Migration Planning
Before completing your migration, the following are a few steps to take to prepare it for success:
1. Take Care of SEO
To begin with, you should address SEO concerns to help the new website rank following the migration.
First, maintain what’s working on your existing website to preserve your rankings. These elements can include URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, structured data, linking strategies, and more.
Keeping those integral pages intact, you can then begin optimizing pages that don’t already have optimization.
You can start by conducting keyword research for each page and optimize your content accordingly by including target keywords naturally in the new content.
In addition, you should develop a redirect strategy to further help maintain your SEO performance. This process will involve redirecting your current pages to relevant URLs on the new site and minimizing the number of 404s.
URL structures on your new site should also be SEO-friendly, relevant, and clear.
2. Conduct a Content Audit
Look closely at your existing content and determine if it could benefit from any updates or additions. Content should be SEO-optimized while remaining engaging and user-friendly across your site.
In conducting your audit, optimize your metadata, including all title tags and meta descriptions. These elements will appear in search results and can directly and indirectly affect SEO.
After auditing your content, you can develop a content matrix that gives you a visual aid for organizing your content. This map will tell you which content will go where on the new site, providing clear directions for redirects and migrations.
3. Perform a Technical Audit
To supplement your content audit, you should conduct a technical audit that looks into the performance of your new website.
Make sure you have all of your website’s current data backed up to simplify the transition to your new site. You can do so by downloading your website’s directory using your hosting site’s FTP client, but keep that data in a secure location.
You can also test your new platform by creating a test environment. Taking this step can help you identify and address any technical issues with your website migration before officially launching the new site.
Completing the Migration Process
After preparing your website during the pre-migration phase, you can start the migration process. Here, you’ll want to complete these steps:
Step 1: Set Up Your New Environment
The beginning of the migration process involves setting up the new environment. Prepare the new site’s layout and URLs before transitioning, once again testing the environment to facilitate a smooth transfer.
Step 2: Schedule a Launch Date
Set a specific day to launch your site migration, which should give you plenty of time to prepare. Leading up to the day, you can organize all content, SEO, and other components to keep your migration efficient.
Step 3: Transfer Your Content
With the new environment setup, you can start moving your content over from the current site. The website transfer will incorporate all backup data and your redirect strategy, connecting current pages with their new destinations.
Step 4: Test for Quality Assurance
Following website transfers, test the destination site for any hiccups when it comes to the user experience or any backend issues. Make sure your web design and development are good to go and that the site is easy to navigate. Also, all images and other visual content should function properly on the site, making it critical to fix any broken images or other elements before launching the finalized site.
Step 5: Facilitate Crawling and Indexing
Your new site should make it easy for search engine bots to crawl and index it. Ensure your robots.txt file is ready and that you have an XML or HTML sitemap that lists all of your pages for easy crawling.
Step 6: Optimize Page Speed
Page speed optimization is another key component of not only SEO but also the user experience. Take steps to compress images and test page loading times with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Ideally, your pages should take no longer than a few seconds to load to keep users engaged.
Handle Launch Day
When it comes time to launch your site, there are some steps to take to avoid potential setbacks and errors.
To begin with, you should establish a support team to help handle the migration and transfer. This team will be responsible for facilitating the migration and eliminating potential errors.
You should also perform a final site check to ensure there aren’t any problems going into the transfer. Also, update your site’s DNS settings as needed to prepare them for the new site, which will bolster your site’s security and connectivity.
With the help of your team, you can then launch the site and begin monitoring it closely to check for any post-migration issues.
Secure Your Transfer with a Post Migration Checklist
With your site in place, you can begin securing it by doing the following:
1. Monitor Your Site’s Traffic and SEO Performance
Gauge your website’s health by tracking your site’s traffic and rankings. Several tools can help with this, such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4. Using these solutions, you’ll be able to monitor key metrics based on your goals, gain valuable insights, and map the customer journey to continually optimize your site.
2. Test UX and Request Feedback
Keep your website user-friendly by testing the user experience. One way to go about this is to request feedback from users to help identify any problems that hinder usability. Based on this feedback, you can make any necessary adjustments to your site for optimized performance.
3. Address and Resolve Any Issues
Even after a generally successful transfer, you may experience certain issues with your new site, including 404s and missing content. While having some 404s might be acceptable, you’ll want to minimize them as much as possible by redirecting old URLs to relevant existing pages. Also, integrate any missing content from backup data collected during your migration.
How to Effectively Rebrand Online
While not all migrations involve website rebranding, you may wish to do so as part of this process. When rebranding online, here are some guidelines to keep your rebrand simple and effective:
Designing Your Strategy
When preparing your website rebrand, consider the various design elements you want to incorporate. For example, incorporate a new logo or any changes in color schemes across your site for consistency.
Additionally, keep all messaging aligned with your rebrand throughout the site and in off-site media. Together with visual components, you’ll establish more brand recognition as you complete the website rebranding process.
Regarding SEO, consider the impact that rebranding online will have. For instance, branded keywords may change if you’re changing your company name, service areas, or offerings. Linking strategies could also change, such as backlinks appearing on other websites with brand mentions.
Finally, complete the strategy with a communication plan. This step will indicate to both customers and stakeholders that you’re engaging in a rebrand to avoid confusion and keep everyone on board. Blog posts, press releases, social media posts, and other content could relay the rebrand to all relevant audiences.
Launching the Strategy
Now that your website rebrand is ready, it’s time to launch it. Conduct a fully coordinated rollout to keep all designs, messaging, SEO elements, and communications consistent on all channels.
Following the rollout, you can monitor your rebranding campaign and make any necessary changes. You might find that certain components of your rebrand aren’t working as well as you’d planned, in which case making subtle adjustments could assist your rollout.
Complete Your Next Website Migration with Ignite Visibility
Planning a website migration or engaging in rebranding online? The team at Ignite Visibility can give you the help you need to ensure its success.
With our experts by your side, you can:
- Prepare your website for a successful migration through pre-migration planning
- Effectively transfer all content to your new platform
- Optimize your migration with SEO for consistently high rankings
- Rebrand your business with a successful rollout
- Monitor your site and make any required adjustments to maintain performance
Reach out to us today to get started, and we’ll discuss your specific needs to develop a comprehensive migration strategy.
