Are you ready to migrate your eCommerce website?
Moving a website to a new design, theme, or platform can improve your traffic and organic rankings. However, it can also have negative effects on your organic rankings. The negative effect on organic traffic is usually significant.
The process of redesigning or switching to a CMS can be overwhelming at best, and a nightmare at worst. We have compiled a checklist of essential steps to ensure a smooth eCommerce website migration.
1. Plan a successful migration
You’ll need to think about the various teams involved in the migration of a site. Depending on the team’s workload and other priorities, coordination with each team can reduce or increase your timeline. These are the key elements to keep in mind when you migrate to or upgrade to a new platform.
Site Hierarchy
You should consider how the new categories and subcategories will affect the site’s structure if you plan on adding them. Each category should be unique, and subcategories must relate to the main one.
You should ensure that your most important pages are easily accessible from any page of the website. You should only be able to find the most important pages within two to three clicks from each page on your website.
Content migration
Even if your site’s content has largely remained the same, it is still important to ensure that your new site uploads and formats it correctly. Here’s a quick checklist to help you migrate content.
- All content has been copied.
- Your rich media, i.e. Images and videos are downloaded and saved as a database
- Before being uploaded to the new website, all images have been compressed and optimized.
- Keywords are optimized for the title, description, and other tags
- To match the existing site, blog content categories and tags are created on the new platform
Content Overhaul
You must be careful not to alter any keywords rankings if you’re completely rewriting content to suit the new style or layout. Search engines may view a page differently if new content is added, even though the URL remains the same.
When you are redesigning your site content, it is important to have a solid SEO strategy.
Moz’s resources for site migration emphasize the importance of having a clear vision of your goal and how you will get there.
It can take weeks, or even months to redesign a site depending on how large it is.
2. Redirect and check old URLs
You might find URLs that no longer have relevance, aren’t ranked over time or don’t convert at the rate you want.
You should pull a report on all PPC landing pages that are being used under your AdWords campaigns. It is easy to lose track and forget about all PPC landing pages. If they are still driving conversions, you will want to include them in your migration. Make sure to do the same for Retargeting (Adwords/Social), Affiliate, Display, Shopping campaigns, and any other advertising you run so you don’t lose traffic-generating pages.
You might need to migrate your blog along with your eCommerce pages due to many platform changes. Make sure that the URLs for blog posts remain the same. Step 4.
It’s best to keep your URLs the same as before you migrate. If your site is newer, the product and category pages will have many internal and external links that help to provide authority. Losing those URLS could negatively impact your SEO.
It is essential to plan where URLs will redirect when they need to be changed. To minimize the amount of error pages search engines and customers may discover, all 301 redirects must be in place before the new website is launched.
This guide will show you how to implement 301 redirects successfully.
Your list of URLs to redirect may grow as you review old URLs. You’ll need to:
You can hustle to have all those redirects completed in a matter of days
OR
B) Prioritize URLs that you want to redirect and those that you should abandon
If you choose option B, you will need to conduct an audit of your website to identify which pages are most important and which pages have external and internal links to them.
To win an SEO strategy, you need to have authoritative backlinks. You can use tools such as Google Search Console to audit your backlinks and determine which ones have an impact on your site’s authority. Ahrefs and Majestic Search SEO are good options to identify backlinks.
You should also update your local citations and business listings with the new URLs.
3. Review your Metadata
Many website owners see migration as an opportunity for a complete audit and re-optimization of metadata. Page titles are an essential factor in SEO. This is a great opportunity to revise existing titles and descriptions.
Search Engine Watch wrote in an excellent piece about metadata title tags, “The title tag” is the boldest and most obvious element of a search result. It plays a significant part in the decision-making process as to whether a searcher will click your result.
You should ensure that all pages of your site have unique titles and descriptions. Also, make sure they are optimized for search engines and customers.
4. Implement schema markup
Schema markup — AKA additional code that gives search engines more information about your site — allows users to find more relevant information from you during searches. It is an essential step in SEO success.
You want those superstar ratings to appear when users search Google for your products. You want users to be able to see the prices and availability of your products before they visit your site. These are all features that Google can pull from schema markup to make your result more appealing to users to click.
Schema.org can help you implement your markups, if they weren’t your last time or if you need to refresh your team on this step.
5. Check for duplicate content
It’s a good idea to use filters if you have more than 20 products or decide to implement an infinite scroll. This can result in duplicate content.
For example, the URL “https://example.com/bands?color=green&size=large” will display the same selection of products here “https://example.com/bands?size=large&color=green”.
Google warns about duplicate content, as search engine bots may spend more time crawling the same page than crawling other pages. You should use canonical tags to remove duplicate content.
Canonical tags are pages that have similar or identical content to multiple URLs. They consolidate these URLs into one “master” version. This is what search engines see and it improves your SERP position as you don’t get penalized if you have duplicate content.
These are just a few other ways that you can see duplicate content.
- https://example.com/bands (the main page)
- https://www.example.com/bands (notice that this page on the www subdomain is also accessible)
- http://example.com/bands?ref=blog-lady (this version tracks the referral source
- https://example.com/bands?sort=price (how users view the products by lowest to highest price)
These are pages that can be grouped using canonical tags to make it easier for search engines to crawl your site. The canonical tag that would be used for these pages looks something like the following (placed in the headers of all the pages above):
http://example.com/bands”/ >
6. Check your redirects
It’s better to be safe than sorry. To ensure that all redirects match the new theme, you can also check the redirect files your team is going to use. It is also important to understand where the redirection will occur. You want to find out if redirects are happening through your server access site via HTTPS or files within your store’s platform.
BigCommerce, Shopify, and Magento all offer plugins and apps to allow redirects to be implemented. Make sure you double-check and plan your implementation.
To ensure that your redirects work properly, you will need to test them all. You should do this testing right after the launch to ensure that any error pages are fixed as quickly as possible. To find any 404 pages that were missed during the design process, it is best to use a crawling program.
7. Create and submit your XML sitemap
After your site has been fully developed and is ready to go live, you will need to create your XML Sitemap to submit to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. To create your XML Sitemap, you can use a tool such as the Frog SEO Spider.
BigCommerce will display your sitemap automatically if your website is hosted there. WordPress Woocommerce Magento and Shopify all offer this service.
Depending on how many products or SKUs you have on your website, you might need multiple sitemaps to build your sitemap. We recommend that you create separate sitemaps for each category and subcategory if your website has more than 100 SKUs.
It is important to upload the sitemap to your website once it has been created. Then submit it to search engines. You can also follow another easy guide by Google for submitting your XML Sitemap.
8. Verify that the analytics tracking code works
You must double-check that your analytics tracking code works after the XML sitemap has been submitted to Google. Now is the best time to install your new analytics code.
To ensure your analytics code is properly reporting traffic, you can follow this Google guide.
You will want to ensure that your analytics settings are identical for the new site and the old site during this process. This will prevent any disruptions in reporting and ensure that your analytics reports still track the same events as they were on the previous site.
To ensure that you are not losing completions, make sure to check your settings for your destination pages and events. To double-check that your ecommerce tracking is working, you should run several transactions.
9. Double-check links in emails and downloadable resources
Finally, go through all transaction emails and abandoned cart emails to make sure you have the correct links for the new pages. Although this can be time-consuming, it is necessary.
Also, make sure to check any downloadable assets (ebooks or PDFs) to verify that the hyperlinks in those assets have been updated and are available on your site.
Site migration can be a complicated process that could seriously impact your SEO. This checklist will help you avoid potential problems by creating a thorough, planned plan for your site migration.
10. Track ALL changes to your site with annotations
You can track any major changes to the site using annotations in Google Analytics. To keep track of any changes made to the site between the old and new versions, use the checklist that we created. You can make some useful annotations and notes, such as: Launching a new site, launching the Summer product line, launching the Hanvey collection, updating all category pages, etc.
Each new annotation can be written in 160 characters. You should annotate any site or marketing changes. This will allow anyone working on the account to understand why there was a spike or dip in traffic.
