Step-by-Step Guide: How to Migrate Your Website to WordPress

WordPress is the leading CMS in the industry, being responsible for around 40% of the websites that are live today. It is one of the first website builders to provide the level of customisation that it has today. With a very large community, WordPress continues to grow with more and more businesses using it each day.

For most businesses, they will have a website that is made using WordPress. However, you may own a website that isn’t WordPress and you are looking to make the switch over. This is something that you cannot do instantly without carefully considering the important aspects of a website. A website migration is very technical and many things can go wrong so you need to ensure you have a checklist that covers everything for your migration. Luckily for you, we have covered you covered.

The Checklist Before Your Migration

Create A Backup of Your Current Website

Before you do anything, you need to create a backup of your current website. You can either do this yourself or use a third-party tool to do it yourself. Only those who are experienced coders should manually back up a website and ensure it is saved safely.

Pick Your Hosting, DNS, CDN and Mail

The next stage is choosing your hosting and WordPress has many hosting options on the CMS. If you are switching to a hosting provider then you may need a web developer or an SEO agency to complete this as they will have experience doing this. It is easy to get this wrong so it may be better for you to level it in the hands of a well-experienced professional.

Once everything is in place on the staging site, choose your DNS, CDN and mail and put it all in place before making the switch.

Create Redirects For Your Most Valuable Pages

If a migration isn’t completed correctly, you can lose a lot of traffic which can lead to a drop in revenue. One of the reasons for this is because redirects haven’t been put in place for your website. Redirects are essential if you are changing something during the migration process, for example, the URLs. A URL change can be a minor change but it can lead you to losing traffic. 

SEO Structure Is Just As Important

The next thing you need to do is ensure it is SEO friendly. If you don’t have any experience in SEO then you may need an SEO agency to do this for you. An SEO agency in Yorkshire will have the tools and expertise to ensure you have the correct SEO structure. They will check a number of things such as alt Tags, URL structure, crawlability, Robots.txt file, Hreflang, internal links, mobile layout and much more.

Review Top-Performing Pages

Once you are in the process of the migration, review your best-performing pages. Check to ensure the redirects are working and the page is designed correctly. Make sure you don’t notice any errors when reviewing these pages.

You will also need to review the rankings of these pages. When going through a migration, keyword rankings can dip slightly but after a while, they should return to their best position.

Run Site Crawlers

The next step is to run a site crawl for the old website and the new which will highlight any broken links that may have been missed. It will also check to see if the redirects have been completed correctly and if the metadata has been carried over.

Audit Your New Site

A site audit is also important to ensure that everything is working smoothly. This will review the internal links, the server response time and redirects. It will also review the overall performance of the website to make sure there is an improvement. Canonical tags also need to be in place to ensure they are running correctly.

Make Sure Your New Site Has A Search Console

Your next step is to ensure you have a search console in place for your website. If you had one created for your old site, all you need to do is change the URL for the new website. Once that is created, ensure your XML sitemap is submitted to the search console.

Summary

A website migration can be a failure if you haven’t followed a checklist that ensures everything is covered. However, if you follow this step-by-step guide will help you achieve a successful migration. The last thing you want is your traffic to be lost because rankings have also been lost.

Something else that you will need to ensure is that you benchmark your data. Look at your top-performing pages, both organically and through all traffic. Once you have this data, you can then compare your analytic data to your new data. If you see any dips in specific pages, you will know that something hasn’t been completed correctly such as a redirect. A migration can be stressful but if you have a full team of professionals, you can ensure that your migration is successful. Whether your migration is to upgrade the performance of your site or even just give it a redesign, you still need to ensure everything is running smoothly.