Migration to WordPress: A brief checklist for Safe SEO

In today’s digital commerce, it has become an often followed trend to migrate from one platform to another. The reason may be any (better hosting, looking for scalability & growth etc.) but there always remains a few concerns like data loss, a slump in revenues, bad impact on SEO or any other.

Amongst all these concerns search engine ranking is the crucial one to consider as your huge no. of web traffic depends on it. Due to consumers’ increasing dependency on search engines like Google or Bing, it has become important for retailers or other online business owners to remain at the top of the list for more web traffic and conversions.

And, SEO or search engine optimization is a technique to optimize your website from various aspects like web design, URL structure, internal linking, keyword stuffing etc. so that search engines can easily crawl your web pages and rank them accordingly.

In context to migration to WordPress, whenever you proceed with the moving of your website’s content or other stuff, it can badly hamper your current SEO tweaks that you have performed previously. Let’s see below:

- Changing URLs can confuse search engines even the content is same on both;

- Impact on Page load speed due to new code involvement;

- Any change in content can have both positive & negative impact on SEO.

So, there comes a need to follow a set of rules to consider pre-migration for WordPress with an assist from WordPress web migration company or expert. Let’s begin with a few of them below:

- Server testing

When your website is on a staging environment for testing purpose, you need to ensure that you have properly blocked search engines via robot.txt file. This way search engines won’t be able to crawl your website before its final setup.

NOTE: You need to place robot.txt file at the root of your staging environment.

- Having Google search console and analytics setup

Google Analytics is popular and free to use analytics solution for any website and you need to make sure its proper setup. And, this is due to its offerings like providing insight into your consumers’ acquisition, behavior, and conversions.

It is useful for both pre-migration and post-migration checks in terms of a sustained SEO. In case, you don’t have any setup then you need to opt for one now.

- Note down present SEO issues

If you are planning to change the current theme or present content of your website, identifying any present SEO issues may be of great use for you. By flagging SEO issues early, you can easily cope up with them once migrated to new website build and avoid similar mistakes again.

For this, you can opt for free to use or trial version online tools like Onpage.org and Woorank etc. that can easily help you identify some common SEO problems.

- Record current SEO performance

In order to gain an insight into what did and didn’t work in your SEO favor post-migration, you need to keep a record of current SEO performance. Here, the tools like Google search console and analytics can help you to get a fair estimate of your organic web traffic.

It can help you to keep a record of some important metrics like Search Analytics positions, impressions, clicks, click through rate (CTR), internal links, and more. With search console and analytics, you can find data of up to 90 days. So, it is recommended that you should download pages, queries, and pre-migration internal links.

- Setting up URL redirects

Setting up URL redirects that are supposed to change after the migration is required and most important task to do as pre-migration task. It can be quite time-consuming task depending on the size of your website.

How does URL redirection help?

By redirecting the important URLs of your website, you are conveying search engines that content is being moved to new ones, avoid 404-page error and instead shows live page to customers, seamless transition of organic search ranking from old URLs to new ones, and retention of inbound links’ value to old URLs.

With this, I wish to conclude this piece of writing for achieving a safe SEO while moving to WordPress. If you tend to follow the above-mentioned tips, you are definitely ready to migrate while keeping your current SEO safe or making it better on your new server.