While back I shared a post on how to lose 50% of your website’s traffic and burn millions. I link to it a lot to help people that ask me questions online and social media. Realized I should elaborate.
That posts explains how to protect your site during a redesign, but not during a domain migration. Below extends up on the previous post to close that gap.
- Clone your current site (or build your new design) within a staging environment on a different/temporary domain or IP.
- Make sure all content gets migrated/recreated from the old website to the staging environment.
- URLs can sometimes change if you’re changing website platforms. Map the old URL’s to their new replacements.
- For example, oldsite.com/mypage now becomes newsite.com/newpage
- Do NOT do a global redirect. Instead, map. every. single. page. Then prepare a list of redirects from the old domain’s page versions to the matching page version on the new domain so that when you go live Google knows where pages moved.
- Ensure all standard SEO variables like image alts, title tags and meta descriptions are recreated.
- Make sure all images within the new design are scaled to smallest required size to save on image load.
- Also, use image compression apps to save even more page load. I like ImageOptim.
- Ensure BOTH domains are set up within Google Search Console.
- When ready to go live, enable all the redirects from step #4, make your DNS changes to flip the domain, submit a change of address in Google Search Console, and submit a new sitemap on the new domain so Google can re-scan everything.
- Check back daily in case Google identifies errors on your new website. Fix them.
