Migrations can be some time vital for your site, and ultimately your business. They are a little complicated even for professionals. They come in a variety of sizes and shapes like –

• Architecture migration
• Domain migration
• HTTP to HTTPs
• Platform migration
• Subdomain to subfolder migration

There can be a little reduction in traffic post the migration process, but if there is a huge fall in the traffic stats, it indicates something went seriously erratic. There are many factors to check whether the WP 301 redirects were done properly or not. You can depend on WP 301 Redirect plugin to get your redirects right. It ensures that your visitor gets redirected to the new page version, and not the unpopular 404 error, after they request your old URL.

How to overcome migration disaster?

Once you realize there is a migration disaster, you need to fix the damage as soon as possible.

Determine the most meaningful pages

Identify the pages that are struggling with a significant decline in visibility, traffic, and conversion rates. Find the most popular pages, and which had the most clicks, impressions, top ranking, and referrals, before the process of migration. You can do this through historical and current data analysis on Google Analytics.

Comparison of old and new

All changes are not necessarily good. The old pages may include the exact information your audience wanted, while the new one is not as captivating enough or relevant. Compare the pages you assumed as most meaningful. Some tools can help you compare the old page with the new versions.

Create keyword list your pages were ranked for

Before the migration, the pages appeared and ranked for specific topics and keywords. Create a keyword list of the pages that got ranked, in order to find out if the related keywords on the new pages are showing in search results. Visibility loss can be bad for your site, so monitor your page performance closely.

Closely go through the pages

Thoroughly check thorough your old and current site to identify any issues or gaps between both versions. Analyze the Metadata, indexation, and content to find out if it got affected during migration.

Check redirects

Broken links are seen as unreliable by search engines, as they block the crawling or indexing. It means your site loses a spot in both, organic and paid searches. It indicates that your site is non-existent on the World Wide Web.

Redirects are user-friendly and also approved by any search engine. Proper redirecting maintains the URL structure’s integrity. It ensures that the seekers get to the new version, without ending up on the 404 error page. Redirecting has to be done in many places.

You will need to check not just the internal links, but even those backlinks coming from the other sites 404s. First, identify the popular external links that are pointing towards your pages. It will help to reclaim the traffic that was once driven towards your site.

Ensure that all the external links get redirected to the new relevant page, without creating any unnecessary redirect loops. Bad redirecting even causes duplicated content, so it is wise to seek professional help to fix migration issues.

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Paul Watson