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Site migrations are a necessary yet often daunting task for any business, particularly for large brands that generate a majority of their revenue online and with millions of pages to move.
But don't worry — whether you're dealing with a platform shift, domain migration, or a complete redesign, we've gathered key insights and actionable advice from experts at top brands across the US and EMEA to help make your site migrations as smooth and successful as possible.
Before the migration: Setting the stage for success
1. Clarify the type of migration and why it’s needed
There are multiple types of migrations for a variety of goals. For example, a domain migration involves switching from one domain to another, while a platform migration focuses on changing platforms (e.g., from one CMS to another). Sometimes, these changes happen together and will require extra planning if so. Knowing exactly what you’re dealing with, and why, will help you define your path forward.
For example, when the popular sportswear brand On began their top-level domain migration in 2023, "It was a branding reason,” said SEO Team Lead Max Woelfle. “Initially the brand was known as On Running. We do so much more than running shoes.”
But it wasn’t as simple as redirecting “onrunning.com” to “on.com”: “One of the challenges for us is ‘on’ itself has meaning. It’s a horrible word to optimize for,” Woelfle said. “So the idea was buying on.com to also fill the word ‘on’ with meaning that relates to our brand, and I think owning the top-level domain was a good step for that.”
2. Get early involvement from the SEO team
If not planned carefully, site migrations can result in a significant negative impact across all channels, organic in particular. Your SEO team should be involved as early as possible, not as an afterthought.
The SEO team will be able to produce, organize, and prioritize the URLs, content, and assets that must be accounted for throughout the migration. Their input will make sure that the right considerations are built into the migration timeline and strategy. When SEO is only brought in toward the end, it results in rushed decisions or last-minute additions that can impact the site’s long-term performance.
When Dave Marks, former CTO of Recurrent Ventures, undertook the massive and expensive project of replatforming a portfolio of websites concurrently, the SEO team was involved from the start. “[We] didn’t need a lot of buy-in at the executive level because the executives understood the pain that the editorial staff was experiencing, the pain that the technical debt was bringing us,” said Marks. “All of that said, if you’re going to spend that amount of money, you need to build a business case and SEO was part of that business case, laying out all the opportunities that we’re going to unlock for technical SEO juice when we get to a platform that we actually have control over. And from there, they were involved the entire way.”
3. Set realistic expectations with stakeholders
Whether you're migrating an entire website, switching platforms, or changing domains, clear communication with stakeholders is essential.
Migration projects will often involve numerous cross-functional teams, including engineering for the technical tasks, performance marketing for paid media URLs and content, product managers for prioritization and management of timelines and implementations, and even executives for high-level timelines, risk measurement, and value estimates.
Meet early to set expectations and discuss what’s involved, who is responsible for what, and when decisions need to be made. This is also the time to define KPIs and the specific goals for the project.
4. Create a detailed checklist and roadmap
Migrations are complex projects. Build a comprehensive checklist to keep things organized. It should include all steps, from discovery and taxonomy analysis to development and QA. Be sure to get stakeholder buy-in to finalize what teams should be responsible for which tasks.
Also have a rough roadmap that includes target dates for each phase. This way, you can ensure that deadlines are met and nothing gets overlooked. Digital project management platforms like Asana, Jira, and others can help your team manage all the moving pieces.
During the migration: Staying on track
5. Maintain clear, consistent communication
It’s important to keep everyone aligned and informed. Setting up a recurrent meeting where key stakeholders can share updates and ask questions will be necessary to ensure this alignment.
Weekly emails or updates on internal messaging apps like Slack or Teams are another great way to provide transparency and let everyone know when their involvement will be needed, and to help make sure no one is caught off guard by changes or delays.
6. Be disciplined with documentation
As you progress, be diligent in preserving artifacts (designs, product features) and documenting every decision along the way. This can make a big difference when issues arise down the line or when teams need to revisit decisions.
Also, when facing challenges or compromises, be discerning when deciding whether an issue needs to be handled immediately or if it can be addressed in a future update.
Implementation tips: Getting the details right
7. Pre-launch preparations
Before launching your new site, take advantage of tools like Botify Analytics to crawl and analyze your old website. You can also monitor your log files to catch any crawl issues with LogAnalyzer. Having this analysis on hand will help you establish a benchmark for performance and quickly prioritize any problem areas, clean up and create needed redirects, plus identify high-performing pages for preservation on the new website.
In addition, blocking access to the new site before launch will be necessary to prevent Google from crawling it prematurely and to avoid users visiting an incomplete site.
Use the ActionBoard in Botify Intelligence to easily sort through any issues and to prioritize updates.
8. Consistency is key
When migrating, consistency is king. Canonicals, sitemaps, schema, and internal linking should all point to the same URLs they used to. In cases where specific categories won’t be migrated from the old to the new site, or if new categories are being created, redirects can come in handy to make sure each and every old URL points to a page on your new domain.
Implement single-hop 301 redirects to move users and crawlers from the old URLs to the new ones. Update any legacy redirects to avoid unnecessary hops, and remember, redirects need to be maintained indefinitely.
If there’s any inconsistency or a large number of broken links, you risk not only hurting your rankings and thus your traffic and trustworthiness, but also decreased engagement and brand loyalty as frustrated users encounter 404s or missing categories. All of this eventually translates into lost domain authority and revenue.
9. Crawl the new site
Crawl your new site to identify any gaps in technical or content metrics. Compare it against your old site and see if all important elements are intact. This step will help catch issues early, so that you're not launching with unresolved problems.
Using Botify can help make this process seamless by crawling your staging site to reveal any content discrepancies or technical issues, allowing you to resolve them before your new website goes live.
Final checks before going live
10. Launch, but with caution
When it’s time to launch, remove any blocks to the new site to allow users and search engines to access it. Test that your redirects are functioning correctly, and verify that your canonicalization is intact. Double check all web analytics scripts and tags to confirm they’re firing correctly.
You should also update your robots.txt file and submit your new XML sitemap to search engines, making it easier for their crawlers to discover, explore, and index your new site.
Unfortunately, you can’t just assume search engine bots will automatically crawl your new domain. “Make sure Google knows,” advises Sharanya Srinivasan, former Senior Director of Growth, SEO, Martech at Care.com. “I know it’s a simple change, but a lot of smaller companies don’t realize it. Sometimes big companies don’t…Google says ‘Oh, I have it in my index, I’m just going to keep it there.’ So you kind of have to force Google to crawl it.”
You can proactively prompt search engine bots to crawl your new website through tools like IndexNow or SmartIndex’s Push to Bing feature, and request indexation of your priority pages’ new URLs through Google Search Console (GSC).
Monitoring and measuring success
11. Monitor time-sensitive KPIs to measure success
After the migration, be prepared for fluctuations in traffic and rankings. The more comprehensive your post-launch monitoring, the quicker you can identify and resolve issues.
In the first few hours after migrating, run user acceptance testing (UAT checks), validate redirects, and generally make sure that everything is working as it should. Over the few days following the migration, focus on monitoring your GSC for potential issues with search performance.
While immediate performance decline on popular pages can let you know quickly if you made any errors, other areas of your site might take more time to adjust, so it’s imperative to monitor your KPIs over an extended period of time. In the weeks following the launch, keep an eye on indexation rates, crawl budget utilization, and any organic traffic anomalies.
“Focus on the traffic,” Srinivasan says. “You start looking at your leading indicators: Are you getting the impressions that you used to get? Are the number of URLs you used to have indexed? Is it climbing up in a steady manner? It isn’t going to happen overnight.
12. Track business metrics
Beyond traffic and rankings, track your business KPIs, such as revenue, order volume, and channel performance, because these ultimately determine the success of the migration. The long-term impact on your business goals is just as important as the technical side of the migration.
The bottom line
Site migrations are complex, but with the right approach, they don’t have to be overwhelming. By getting SEO involved early, setting clear expectations with stakeholders, creating detailed checklists, and keeping an eye on your technical requirements, you can have smooth (as possible) migration and avoid common pitfalls. Remember, site migrations are an ongoing process, so always be ready to monitor and measure the results post-launch.
Want to streamline your next site migration? Try a demo of Botify and see how our tools can help you navigate every stage of the process with ease.
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