I. Map the data
Consider the data architecture on the source and target systems, identify differences, and decide how you want to approach them.
How to migrate as smoothly as possible?
WEBSITE MIGRATION CHECKLIST
What is Website Migration?
Websites come in many forms, Static web pages, HTML formats, sites managed by Website Builders, and websites managed by Content Management Systems (CMS).
Website migration is all about transferring and moving web content and data from one site platform to another website management platform.
Automating this process saves you a massive amount of time and hard labor.
When migrating your website data, you want to make sure that you are prepared. Here is a 3-phase checklist to make your migration perfect.
01. Pre-Migration Preparations
Prepare the necessary tools/services
Automating various migration-related tasks can save you a great deal of time and effort.
Plan to migrate during a quiet period
Avoid losing any traffic, it’s important to make sure that if you do lose traffic, you lose it when business is already slow.
crawl your website
You need the data from your old/current website - all URLs, page titles, metadata, redirects, broken links, etc.
02. Data Transfer Tips
II. Set up target system
Think of what has to be done on a new CMS before transferring the content into it.
III. Test your migration
Testing is a key element of every migration project. Select a large enough data sample and perform a trial migration to spot any possible errors or defects.
IV. Make system changes
Based on the results of the test migration, make any required changes to your system configuration,
migration method, or data.
V. Transfer the content.
Manual vs. automated migration
Manual Data Migration
It involves a person or team of people doing the work of copying and pasting a site’s content from one platform to another.
- Human capital is costly.
- As with anything that people touch, the potential for human error exists.
- For large amounts of content, manual migration is simply not feasible.
Automated Data Migration
This method is obviously better:
- You won’t lose anything.
- It provides the possibility to easily map your migration entities.
- You can test the process and secure the whole process with the migration insurance.
- Additional options you may include 301 redirects, SEO URLs, metadata, attachments, etc.
03. Post-Migration Suggestions
Observe Search Console Crawl & Server Logs
Once you went live, you should closely observe the crawl stats that are now available in the Search Console. For the first 2-3 weeks, you should keep an eye for reported crawl errors from your tools and take necessary actions (such as implementing 301 redirects on all possible 404 errors).
Perform data and system optimization
No matter how thorough your preparation was, there will surely be a few things you will have to adjust after the data transfer.
Measure Website Speed
Every millisecond counts, so you need to review it closely. Every webmaster knows that fast site speed is an SEO ranking signal across devices.
Not sure what CMS to choose?
The 5 Most Popular CMS Platforms
Top 3 CMS Platforms, users decided to move to in 2021
WordPress
96%
Joomla
3%
Drupal
1%