Migrating a large website with hundreds or thousands of pages is a complex and risky procedure for any company. It’s cause for even more concern when the website relies on search engines to drive the bulk of its traffic. We have all heard of horror stories related to website migrations going bad and wiping out a company’s search engine rankings overnight. As a result, we wanted to create a guide on how to migrate website to new host without losing SEO traffic, as well as pass along a few insider tips from our experience of building and migrating dozens of enterprise-size websites. Let’s have a look at the following steps that are needed to follow on how to Migrate your website without hurting SEO.
1. Copying All Content Of Your Existing Site To Your New Domain
When the question comes that how to migrate my website without disturbing the SEO then the very first step you have to follow is copying the content. Before migrating the website, we should create an exact copy of the site to the New domain. To do this, we can use plugins like duplicator Plugins which is used to duplicate the existing WordPress website. You can use Velvet Blues to automatically update the internal links that will help to maintain the SEO ranking.
2. 301 Redirect
Now here comes one of the important step to follow on how to migrate website to new host i.e. 301 redirect your old site to your new site. This will help the humans as well as the search engine robots to find the right page. The 301 redirect actually guides the search engine and browsers that the page has been permanently migrated and passes the link to your new page from the old page.
3. Notifying Google About The Change In Your Domain Name
The next step on how to migrate my website is to notify the Google about the change. After Migration all the traffic are sent to the new domain name. We should notify google about this. The reason for this is that after telling the Google, it will figure out the change, filling out the official form will make the transition easier and ensures us that we will not lose our SEO rankings.
4. Submitting The New Sitemap
5. Use Of Google Search Console For Indexing And Crawling Type Issues
Now as you have made the major changes to your site, now you just have to keep eye on Google Search Console for indexing issues that Google runs into. You have to Check reports like crawl errors, index count, and search queries to assure that the new site is getting properly indexed and crawled. This step should be mandatorily followed, that’s the reason why it is listed on how to migrate website to new host.
6. Updating The Inbound Links
The next step on how to migrate your website is to update the inbound links. You just have to reach out the sites that are linked to you and just ask them to update the links to the new domain name.
7. Notification To The Users About The New Change
This step will not affect the SEO ranking. But yes its important too when it comes to the question- how to migrate website to new host without interfering the SEO. By notifying the users about the migration, they will get to know about the domain switch we have done. This will probably eliminate the confusion and it will make sure that users reach the right page with a proper URL. There are many ways by which you can do this like you can write a post on the new site with a proper explanation of the change and reasons to change it. Also you can create a 404 error page.
Conclusion: – Wait and Watch
Lastly you just have to wait and monitor the changes. After doing all this stuffs to minimize the effect on SEO just wait for the google to index your news site properly. You might see some drop in SEO ranking but its temporary. And soon you will encounter that your site has been migrated successfully without hurting SEO.
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