6 Steps for a smooth Website Transition

The task of having a new website built can seem quite daunting especially if your current website has a lot of content on it.

Managing all the valuable content and transferring it across to the new website can be quite challenging as well as worrying in case it affects the SEO you’ve been working on for years.

It is worthwhile transferring all of your old blog posts and pages to your new website to ensure your SEO isn’t harmed. Make sure you don’t lose any Google juice by following these steps:

Step 1: Planning

This is where you need to revise the important factors of your current website and decide what needs to be transferred across to your new website.

This might be content, existing SEO work, page content, video content and content you link to from your website.

In the planning process you may want to upgrade or rewrite content, add new pages or get rid of old content and this needs to be tracked and accounted for to guarantee a successful transfer.

Step 2: Relocation of content

Once the content is moved over, you will want to apply any of the edits or changes to the new site, including deleting pages and updating content. After this you will have to implement any URL redirects to ensure the user ends up in the right place.�

If you’re changing the URL structuring it’s crucial that you set up the correct redirects.

Step 3: Check for broken links�

During the move of content you are likely to have broken links from your old content on your website. There are many tools you can use to help identify and fix broken links.

Step 4: Testing

Always test before you make it live. Once you’ve moved your content and gotten everything ready, you need to test everything and get to know the new website. Check all the links, navigation, images and content.  

Step 5: Once live, check for crawl errors

The Webmaster tool is great for this, as it monitors “crawl errors” on your website. Crawl errors are generally pages that have gone missing or have been removed. Once discovered all you have to do is recreate a new page or redirect it to an existing page.

Step 6: Watch the visitors

You will want to track everything after you move your website and see how things are performing on the new website compared to the old website.

You’ve just changed your user experience so you want to make sure the new website is user friendly.

Final thoughts

If you employ a professional web design company they should cover all these steps in the build but it doesn’t hurt to check it yourself to ensure your new website isn’t losing out.

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant