What is Site Migration?

Site transformation is an operation that changes the site’s platform, design, UX, HTTPS, structure, content or venue. Changes may have a huge effect on the popularity of the search engine. You therefore ought to understand certain important issues before you make any adjustments.

The time has come: with all the Google notifications, the browser alerts and the pressure from your fellow SEOs and rivals, your site needs to move on to a new and safer life. 

We know that migration to the HTTPS safe protocol is a big transition that needs a great deal of work from a variety of departments in your business. It will not only impact the SEO team (and KPIs) or load developers with a million specifications, but will also see the marketing department making some changes to their platforms and pay to change their promotions. Last but not least, the Board will need to be warned of all the updates that the site will undergo in the coming weeks. Have them primed for new data before you report updates to the migration website. 

Having said that, we suggest that you clarify the next steps to all the parties concerned and that you ease any concerns about the implications of this form of site migration.

With the acquisition of an SSL certificate that allows us the platform to provide the customer with a fully protected connection, you need to update your website or CMS to use HTTPS in all links and static data. Through this, no pages will be lost or left orphaned. 

What changes: URLs, internal connections, canonicals, rel prev/next, hreflang, and static files (js, css, images). 

With all this in mind, the SEO team wants to monitor-and evaluate! -the whole procedure with the probability of mistake. 

After migration, the URLs will be new, and it will take some time to get the authority. 301 redirects will not transfer the 100% domain authority either, and we will also seek to improve the latest sites in this direction.

Google will take a few days/weeks to index new URLs to the search results, but the old links will continue to appear for some time, redirecting to new pages. Since Googlebot doesn’t access any website instantly, all HTTP and HTTPS URLs will be available together for some time at the same time.

As the new pages are indexed, you can encounter a temporary decrease in ranks, resulting in a loss of traffic. You will stop this temporary decline if you follow our checklist. 

Migrating to a stable protocol may also be terrifying due to the risk of lack of visibility and mistakes that could arise if the mechanism has not been well set, monitored and reviewed. There is no reason to worry, however, because:

When we continue to rebound, it will always happen that we dramatically boost our pre-migration rankings! 

Google would also pay for websites that switch to a more stable protocol, recognizing that HTTPS redirects are intended to enhance user experience. In order to achieve this, they speed up and promote indexing and rating recovery. 

Another significant part of this change is that search engines offer preference to HTTPS URLs because they are safer for the customer. After migration, we will be much more competitive in rankings, on websites that continue with HTTP and fight for the same keywords. 

When switching from HTTP to a safer protocol, there would be a lot of SEO specifications to meet and a lot of focus to keep any element under control. By implementing these main recommendations, you would have a clear foundation to work with the project:

In cases when a connection leads to a redirected page or a page that returns a 404 error, the content editors would be required to modify the internal links of the web such that the internal link goes straight to the final page without passing through some redirect chain. Redirect chains slow page loading which will make it impossible for Google to index new URLs after migration. 

Configure the Google Search Console for a new domain and make sure that we do the same for our own tracking software.

Upload.xml web maps with new URLs to Google Search Console to inform Google that we have new sites and therefore compel indexing. 

Once the site has been redirected to the secure protocol, it’ll be time to crawl your website Again, this time with the new domain in HTTPS, to document improvements with our website comparison app. Without a question, this is the perfect way to verify whether the transfer has been properly implemented: you will have all the information on your new domain and it will be easy to find any mistakes due to the full comparative choices. 

Track the locations and count keywords and make sure that the HTTPS URL is connected to all the SEO Keywords monitoring apps. Remember, you’re going to suffer a lack of exposure, but this should rebound with more presence than before. 

Track KPIs: visits and conversions mainly, though they can vary depending on the business model. 

Make sure the robots.txt is correctly migrated and that all knowledge remains in place.

on’t forget to update the URLs on your Google My Company listings for SEO Local as well. 

Most notably, appreciate the rise in visits and conversions over time.