When undergoing a website migration, e-commerce businesses must take great care to preserve existing SEO equity. It ensures that hard-earned organic rankings and traffic levels are not negatively damaged or lost post-migration. Magento 2 migration services provide specific expertise in strategically transitioning to a new platform or design while maintaining and boosting SEO. Companies can achieve an efficient, ranking-preserving migration by carefully planning URL mappings, carefully setting up redirects, and conducting extensive testing before launch.
Inventory of existing URLs
Robust SEO crawlers such as Screaming Frog can completely scan the current website and output an extensive sitemap of all pages and URLs that must be maintained. It sheds light on the architecture and content of the site, highlighting specific pages and assets that the organization wants to redirect securely to appropriate new locations.ย
Understanding the URL structure across all site sections gives fuller visibility into the scope and volume of migration redirection needs. It also indicates priority pages earning significant organic traffic that warrant extra redirect care.
Comprehend URL changes
Businesses should intimately comprehend the specifics of all upcoming URL changes that the migration will entail. For instance, the existing site may use product IDs or nondescript URLs, while the new platform has a completely different human-readable URL structure. Or perhaps site information architecture and navigational organization are being completely reworked with new categorical hierarchies. Detailing these transformations at a granular level is essential to then intelligently connect where old landing pages should redirect to new destinations. Resources like complex spreadsheet mappings can precisely trace individual relationships between legacy and future URLs across all site content.
Flesh out new URLs of the site
The URLs of the new site also need to be mapped before launch to understand the requirements for redirects. By comprehensively outlining detailed information architecture, content development, and URL naming plans for the migrated platform, businesses discern which new pages will need specific SEO preservation redirects pointing to them. These emergent URLs then get accurately paired with legacy URLs in the migration spreadsheet. Together, the old and new URL lists synthesize into the connective bridge between current and future site editions.
Redirects as technical execution
By implementing 301 permanent redirects between outdated and emergent URLs on a one-to-one basis, search engines can seamlessly transfer hard-won SEO equity directly to the appropriate new landing pages. It preserves rankings and the integrity of external backlinks. Redirect plugins for major content management systems can enable mass redirect programming between domains based on these core source and target spreadsheets.
Quality assurance checks
Before initiating a public launch, the newly migrated website must undergo comprehensive quality assurance checks in a staging environment. All previous high-value URLs should trigger seamless redirects to active corresponding pages which render as expected across devices. Businesses thoroughly test and verify key site-wide functionality like:ย
- navigation;
- analytics implementation;
- structured data markup;
- page speeds;
- responsiveness.ย
Technical SEO audits
Technical SEO audits at this stage assess redirect chains, indexation signals, metadata, and other factors affecting organic search visibility. Identifying and addressing any migration issues now prevents greater lost traffic and rankings later.
