Eliminating Bad SEO Impact while Migrating to WordPress

Migrating to WordPress is a crucial step towards your professional or personal aspirations. So, you always need to ensure a safe and successful process that cause you no bad impact.

While migrating to a new server, SEO remains the biggest threat to users as it can hamper your web traffic directly to a large extent. In this article, I shall be discussing some important checks that can assist you to eliminate bad SEO impact while WordPress migration.

To start with them, let’s read the points below:-

- Pre-migration testing

A pre-migration testing is critical to take note of all the URLs available on your website. You need to crawl your website to make sure that everything is working fine and so that you must not end up losing useful elements after migration.

There must be some pages of your website that may not show up in the crawl so you can consider taking your own databases and records to address them or Google Analytics data can be a good reference to locate the same.

- Ensuring backup

Many times we do not think of taking active website’s backup that is quite necessary to compare its performance once migrated i.e. if it is functioning smoothly without any problem or with a few. Though, data backup becomes the topmost priority when you decide to migrate your complete website to another platform or a newer version of the current eCommerce platform.

Every time you keep a website backup you are definitely saving your dual working hours as well as money. Therefore, you should always consider structuring a replica of your currently active website and keep it in your local storage for future references.

- A pre-planned approach

A pre-planned approach for website migration is always appreciated. You should always monitor whole migration process closely and look for a slow period when there is less traffic on your website.

Doing this shall definitely allow you to provide a consistent user-experience even when migrating to a new server. You can look for a slow phase of your website that you need to migrate to WordPress, assuming that there is a particular time that holds least hindrance to the website’s performance. Moreover, consulting certified Wordpress cms development services can be helpful to avoid any performance loss.

- Mapping of URLs

You need to maintain an excel sheet containing all the old as well as new website URLs. Ideally, whenever you migrate to a new web platform all of the old web pages remains active on the newly migrated one.

Additionally, if you drop on any of the web pages then search engine like Google may think that your new migrated website is different from the old one so it can alter your ranking, that can cause web traffic loss.

To avoid such issues, you can map all the altered URLs from old to new ones and keep the website architecture same as before. Naming your redirects one by one can also help you cut down the load on server and make the redirection process less painful.

- Avoid content duplicacy

Due to some mistakes or loopholes in the migration process, you can encounter duplicate content that needs to be ignored. You can opt for self-canonicalization to avoid the duplicate content generated from URL query strings.

In case you are using on-site search function then it is recommended to non-index those search result pages and also, you need to make sure that IP addresses are correctly redirecting to URLs.

- Internal links’ updation

Redirects after migration can dampen your website PageRank in search engines badly if still indicating towards your old site instead of new one.

An ideal way to deal with that is updating all the internal links. For this, you need to update domain name and that too without altering the whole website structure. You need to ensure that only text that contains URLs are being updated and not the crucial elements like brand name etc.

Apart from these, you should also consider ‘Sitemap submission’ and setting up ‘Google search console’ to retain your current SEO ranking.

At last, I wish to conclude this piece of writing here while being hopeful that you find the same informative and relevant to your migration plans.