If you’re ready to migrate from your existing Magento 2 store, but don’t want to lose rankings, this post is for you!
Whether you’re considering migrating from Magento 2 to Shopify, Hyvä or another ecommerce platform, ensuring that you perform all of the necessary techniques to secure your site rankings, is essential for protecting your brand during the migration process. Avoiding a drop in rankings and preventing traffic loss is integral to ensuring a successful website migration that will benefit your business in the long run. Whether you’re an ecommerce manager, SEO expert or digital marketer, it’s likely you’ll have to work on a migration project at some point during your career. That’s why we’ve gathered our best tips and strategies to ensure your migration goes seamlessly. Without further ado, here are our top tips for a successful website migration!
1. Robust Technical Preparation
First things first, preparing all of the technical aspects of a migration ar integral to success. Before you begin migrating anything at all, you must ensure that you backup your current website. Everything from your website content, media and sitemap to your customer database and technical data must be backed up to ensure that you don’t lose anything during the transition process. At this stage, you should also select a suitable hosting service. If you’re working with an ecommerce or development agency, hosting is likely to be included but be sure to double check this and gain an understanding of whether or not the proposed hosting provider is robust enough to support your expected traffic flow. Next, you must decide whether or not you’re changing your domain. This isn’t a necessary step in the ecommerce platform migration process but if it’s something you’re wanting to do, it makes to do so during the transition.
2. Comprehensive SEO Considerations
SEO is one of the most important aspects of an ecommerce website migration and shouldn’t be underestimated. Having substantial technical SEO knowledge is advantageous during the process as it will help you along the way, but rest assured that this is something your agency should be implementing to ensure everything is migrated accurately and as precisely as possible. During the migration process, it’s likely that your sitemap will change in order to optimise it for search engines and boost your rankings. As a result, it’s essential to implement 301 redirects from old URLs to the new ones to preserve existing rankings and ensure that any internal links all point to the correct pages. Not only that, ensuring that all meta descriptions, title tags and alt text is all transfered or amended to improve SEO credentials is also integral to a successful migration. Additionally, it’s important to make certain that any existing third-party apps or extensions will work with your new ecommerce platform too! Here are a few technical SEO aspects of the migration you should be aware of:
- 301 Redirects Mapping
- Updating Internal Links
- Checking For Duplicate Content
- Optimising New URLs
- Updating Backlinks
- Updating Site Architecture and Internal Linking
- Updating Robots.txt and Sitemap Files
- SSL Certificates and HTTPS Migration
3. Website Content Audit & Migration
Migrating the technical elements of your website isn’t the only thing that should be on your checklist! Ensuring that all of your website content is migrated is absolutely essential to a successful launch. That means everything from product data such as descriptions, images, prices, SKUs, technical specifications, stock levels and more all the way through to customer data, order history and any blog posts, guides and resources you may have on your site. We always recommend going through your content and auditing it to ensure its optimised for success. A Magento 2 website migration provides a unique opportunity to start your site afresh. By reviewing existing blog posts and separating them into different topic clusters led by keyword research, you can create a robust foundation to build your SEO strategy on going forward. Additionally, it’s a good time to let go or update any outdated or irrelevant content that may be confusing users and search engines, improving the authority and relevance of your website.
4. Considered UX & Design Choices
Believe it or not, UX is actually one of the most important factors to consider when it comes to website migration. Many people underestimate the impact of site speed, performance, responsive design and mobile-friendliness when it comes to SEO rankings and website migration. Ensure that you’re a step ahead of the game by optimising and compressing images to reduce their size and loading times, prioritise accessibility and maximise usability to ensure your site performs at lightning-fast page speed and will rank better within the SERPs as a result. When a user encounters seamless user experience, they are more likely to spend longer on your site, delve further into your content and trust your brand enough to commit to a purchase, whether that’s now or in the future. As a result of this longer dwell time, reduced bounce rate and increased user satisfaction, search engines will rank your site higher than those that don’t offer exceptional UX and speed. If you’re unsure about how to optimise your site for UX, responsiveness and speed, be sure to consult Google’s Core Web Vital metrics to gain a deeper understanding of what is required to meet Google’s expectations.
5. Testing & Pre-Live Checks
Once your new ecommerce site is designed, developed and in theory ready-to-go, it’s time for lots of testings and pre-live checks. Before you even consider to hit the launch button on your migration, you must ensure that everything from your site speed and performance all the way to 301 redirects, internal links, canonical tags and analytics tags are all in tip top shape and performing at their optimum. This stage requires a collaborative effort between all stakeholders to ensure that everything from technical SEO and development functionality all the way to website content, images and the look and feel is exactly what you’re expecting.
6. Post-Launch Monitoring
Once your brand new migrated website is live, it’s time to monitor your site and implement any fixes as soon as issues arise or are identified. This should keep your website in a solid position and ensure that nothing is going to impact rankings. So long as you and your agency have conducted every step thoroughly and have left no stone unturned when it comes to technical preparation, content migration, SEO implementation, UX decisions, pre-launch checks and ongoing monitoring, there really is nothing to worry about when it comes to rankings within the SERPs.
And there we have it! A few top tips for when you’re migrating your online store away from Magento 2. If you need a helping hand with some Magento 2 migration expertise, we’re here to help. Don’t hesitate to get in touch and we’ll be happy to help!
