Does Migration Affect My Website SEO?

If the website migration is well planned and performed, it won’t affect your website’s SEO in any way. However, a lot can go wrong when migrating a website, so make sure it’s necessary in the first place.

Think – why do you want to migrate your website? Could the site issues you’re dealing with be fixed by simply upgrading your current web hosting plan? Perhaps some tweaking and upgrading of the design could solve the problems? Try brainstorming another solution to deal with the current situation.

If you decide that migrating your website is the best course of action, prepare for it well. Make a thorough plan, and if this is your first time, follow a detailed site migration guide.

And for good measure, here is some additional advice to ensure a smooth transition.

Export Your Current Google Analytics Data

If you take SEO seriously, most likely you’re familiar with Google Analytics and its benefits. Use it to see how your website is performing before the migration process and save the results for later. 

Once you migrate your website, run another Google Analytics check and compare the results with the previous feedback. Is there a drop in traffic? If so, check which exact pages are performing worse than before. 

Comparing the Google Analytics reports can give a clear direction as to what has gone wrong and a starting point to fix the problem faster.

Download a Full Backup of Your Site

Another great tip that can save you a huge headache is having the most recent full backup of your website ready in case things go wrong. 

Just imagine your website breaking to the point of no return and you having to build a new site from scratch. This would not only take a lot of time and energy, but it would also cost you dearly in terms of SEO ranking.

That’s why having a full backup of your website is a good idea. Downloading one from your current hosting provider does not take much effort, and it’s always better to be safe than sorry. 

Avoid Changing Your Site

The final tip on migrating your website without affecting its SEO ranking is to avoid making unnecessary changes to your site for some time. 

It may be tempting to delete some pages that are not that useful, improve the site structure, or change the design as you’re already done with the migration. However, making too many changes too quickly can cause Google to see your migrated website as a brand new site, losing all its ranking. 

Better to stay patient and wait until you see the full effects the migration has caused, if any. Only when you’re sure Google views your migrated site as the same site it was before the migration should you start making changes and updating the design. 

Conclusion

The extent to how much your site’s SEO will be affected by the migration depends on many factors. Thankfully, it is possible to migrate your website without any effects at all. 

Plan the migration thoroughly and prepare an action plan if things go wrong. But most importantly, make sure that migration is necessary in the first place. It is a potentially risky endeavor that shouldn’t be done unless it’s definitely needed.