Introduction:

If you’re moving your website to another server or host, you’ll need to migrate it. The migration of a website must be done very carefully since if anything is overlooked, there may be a substantial loss in web traffic due to lost search positions.

Your recovery plan may take some time to fully kick in depending on how much the search engine ranking signals have been affected. And typically, it’s a lot harder to climb back up in rankings than it is to lose rankings.

The good news is that you can avoid all of this by performing an SEO migration whenever you set up a new website!

Why You Need SEO Migration

Suppose you have a website receiving a lot of traffic leads conversions and raking high on keywords, ultimately resulting in good organic traffic. Still, you are looking at rebuilding it and giving it a new look. In that case, you definitely need SEO migration because you have seen good results with the content you have on there already.

SEO migration, in short, includes moving all the existing content, which consists of all the text on your website, over to the new website.

This is important because the text is what helps you rank high on searches, as it includes the keywords. You can, however, add extra content if you want to, but our advice is always to keep what was already there if it was performing well previously.

Many businesses overlook SEO migration simply because they have never heard of it and do not understand its impact on their website and business as a whole.

SEO migration might not be needed in some cases if your keywords are not ranking as high and you are not receiving organic traffic. In that case, you can start from scratch.

However, SEO migration is a must if you have a website that is doing well. Marketing agencies will always be cautious of these provisions.

For example, we will always run a website through SEMrush to check how well the rankings are doing and traffic and if it is worth doing SEO migration when we are set with the task of migrating websites.

What Are the Risks of Not Doing an SEO Migration?

There are several risks that result from not doing an SEO migration. Here are the most important ones to keep in mind.

Drop in Rankings (and traffic!)

Launching a new website with no SEO migration or SEO understanding will ultimately lead to a drop in traffic and rankings. This will be extremely damaging for most businesses, especially to e-commerce stores with thousands of pages.

Even service-based companies can be heavily impacted as they have separate pages of their services as well.

Conversions Start Decreasing

Conversion can be a tricky thing and often it can be difficult to ascertain why a customer may not be converting on a page that used to convert all the time.

When migrating to a new site, this can cause minor changes to the way the site appears – which could be the difference between a user converting or not.

You should be consistently testing whether your web pages are converting, and working to make them convert better as much as you can.

Broken Internal Links

There are SO many websites with a bunch of broken internal links. This is a big thing to keep in mind when performing an SEO migration. When an internal link is broken, your user will be taken to a 404 page when they click it.

As attention span is shorter than ever, this will likely result in them deciding to move on from the site – meaning you lose the customer unnecessarily. An increase in broken links is common following an SEO migration, which is why it’s crucial to work with developers that possess a good attention-to-detail.

Don’t Rush an SEO Migration

SEO migration is definitely something to keep in mind if you are looking to rebuild your website. It will not only save you the headache, but it will also save you a lot of money and potential leads and traffic.

Always speak to an SEO agency if you are looking at rebuilding your website, they will be able to advise you best and help you through the SEO migration process.

As a full-service agency, we will make sure to check the number of pages you are ranking for first because we know the impact it can have. Web developers  who are not part of a full-service agency, will always overlook these things as they do not understand SEO and only focus on web development and design.

So since you’re here, and you’ve read until the end. Why not book a discovery call with us? We’ve handled tons of SEO migrations in the past, and we’d be happy to do the same for you.

Have a listen!

By now, you have probably heard how fantastic SEO can be for you and your business, so you are now prepared to hire someone, but you are still unsure what truly makes an SEO company great.

Selecting the wrong SEO agency for your business can end up being one of the biggest mistakes you’ll make, as it can be costly for you both financially and in time.

To save you the headache, we’ve compiled some of the most critical questions to ask your SEO company to ensure that they are doing the best for you and your business:

Can I See Results from Your Past Clients?

If there are no case studies to show the previous work of the SEO company, then we have a straightforward solution for you: run.

You will need someone confident in their work and someone who can prove they are experts in the game. Case studies are a huge part of that, and the best way to get the measure of how legitimate they are.

For example, here at Nautilus, we do our own SEO and constantly improve it for even better results. We have seen impressive results for our own company, so we are 100% confident that we can do the same for your business’ website. We have statistics and real-life people to prove it – take a look at our previous case studies here.

What Pricing Model Does Your Company Follow?

One of the first questions to ask your SEO company is their pricing model. This will help you stray away from lock-in contracts for 6 – 12 months. If an SEO company wants to lock you into a contract, they’re not confident in the results they can achieve for you. SEO is something you should be continually doing for your business, not just for a year.

Here at Nautilus, we have none of that nonsense. We do not have a lock-in period of any sort; we operate with monthly retainer packages, which can be found here – we only ever ask for a months’ notice if our clients decide to leave our services. We think that is the only fair way for both us as a company and the people we work with.

In our experience, our pricing model has put most clients at ease, leading to higher retention than you’d find at many different agencies. A green flag if we do say so ourselves.

What is Your SEO Process?

From all the questions to ask your SEO company, this might be the most important one.

You should be cautious if a potential SEO company is reluctant to list the work they intend to do for you. Inadequate agencies and sometimes even freelancers tend to hide what they are doing in exchange for the money you’re paying them.

This is why you should always ask what the process is.  If the company you’re speaking to dodge this question, it is more than likely that they are using spammy tactics such as black hat SEO which might damage your website.

Our motto when it comes to SEO is the reverse engineer success approach. We begin with on-page SEO & competitor research – we believe this is the best approach for SEO projects because it can be specifically tailored to the given client and their industry. It also helps us see what the competitors are doing, and this way, we can execute it even better.

Can I Rank and Beat My Competitors’ Keywords?

It is essential that your SEO company can target your competitors’ keywords. This will help you see results and produce a good ROI. However, no one can guarantee you the first page ranking on Google. If they do, they are lying to you.

Some niches can be more competitive than others, so it really depends on which industry you’re in. When operating in a fierce niche, going after longtail keywords – the ‘low-hanging fruit’ – in the beginning to get some backing from Google is a smart plan. After you’ve built your site up a bit, you can aim for the heavier ones.

How long Will it Take to Get a 1st Page Ranking?

SEO is much like a marathon and not a sprint. Here at Nautilus, we usually estimate what to expect in the first few months of working with us, but we would never guarantee first page rankings simply because it is not feasible in the first months of SEO.

If you are looking for a good SEO company, they will be transparent with you, much like we are with our clients. If you are interested in working with us, make sure to have a look at our reviews on Google, Trust Pilot & Yell.

What Monthly Deliverables (keyword ranking, traffic) Can I Expect if I Hire Your Agency?

It would help if you were sure that the SEO company you are hiring could provide you with visible results of the SEO work.

For example, the monthly custom (we don’t just click export, we take all the data and analyse it) report detailing from us will include:

• Keyword rankings
• Traffic overview
• Domain authority
• Spam score
• Backlinks
• Other keywords your website is ranking for
• Bounce rate
• Most viewed pages

Try to get a clear picture of what you can expect to receive from the SEO company you choose to work with. It helps avoid disappointment later.

What SEO Tools Do You Use?

This question isn’t the most important since many tools will perform the same task. But it can be an easy way to ascertain if your SEO company has a strong toolset and demonstrates whether they really know what they’re doing.

Some prime examples of tools used for successful SEO are SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and Search Console.

If you don’t hear any of these mentioned…well, there best be a VERY good reason.

What Do You Need From My Side After On-Boarding?

It would help if you always asked what is needed from your side before the service begins; this will help speed things up and help the agency learn more about your business.

We have designed an easy onboarding document with everything we need to get started. We send it to new clients and start from there. This covers keywords, competitors, and the relevant access we need to start.

Why Choose Us?

• We provide a secure & fast WordPress migration with minimum downtime.
• We offer robust, industry-specific & adaptable migration services to SMEs, enterprises & startup businesses across the world.
• We have performed countless WordPress migrations since 2017.
• We’re extremely experienced & can offer you standard website migration to your new hosting provider.
• Whether it’s an old website that you would like to move, or you need a complete website redesign, we are able to assist you migrate your website securely and efficiently.
• We also offer fully managed WordPress Hosting which is secure, carbon neutral and affordable.

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Sometimes you need to move your entire website — hosts change, fees go up, and sometimes it becomes prudent for any business or individual to hunt greener digital pastures.

You can choose to bring in an outside team to assist you with your migration, especially if you aren’t particularly tech-savvy. Something to keep in mind, though, is that hiring outsourced developers can often take more time and energy than it’s worth.

Many WordPress migration plugins are user-friendly, easy to install, and can handle all of the lengthy details of site migration without burning out your budget or your hard-earned SEO efforts. It’d be costly to migrate to the new site and lose all of the backlinks and authority that keep your business ranking on Google.

Reasons Why You Need WordPress Migration Services

There are many reasons why you need WordPress migration services, which are important to keep in mind.

• Content Marketing Features

WordPress is the tool of choice for several marketing teams and publishers and it’s easy to see why – with inbuilt publishing tools including preview, scheduling, revisions, and more it makes publishing content a breeze for marketing teams.

WordPress also has built-in multiple user roles like super admin, admin, editor, author, and contributor in order that many people can have ownership and contribute across your team.

What’s more, its popularity means that there are tons of plugins that can help you. Content marketing teams with a limited knowledge in SEO can use plugins such as Yoast to ensure they’re hitting the marks in SEO with their content. What’s more, because of WordPress’ popularity, you can easily find tutorials and guidance online for practically any plugin you want to use on the site.

WordPress also has built-in multiple user roles like super admin, admin, editor, author, and contributor in order that many people can have ownership and contribute across your team.

• It’s SEO Ready

Your website should be running on WordPress if you care about SEO. WordPress does a much better job of optimising for search engines than other content management systems. Open-source platforms are typically easier to navigate, and they’re updated more frequently as new features are released.

Another reason why WordPress sites perform better in SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) is because of the numerous SEO tools and plugins that are available for publishers to try. If one SEO plugin isn’t delivering the results, try another. Yoast SEO is widely referred to as the best SEO plugin for publishers, but there are many options available within the WordPress plugin directory.

• Web Pages Load Faster

Most people surfing the net will abandon any website that takes longer than 2-3 seconds to load. A 3rd of these people will leave if it takes one second to load the page. Having slow load times not only destroys your potential traffic, but Google will also detect the bounce rates, this will in turn affect your search rating.

With WordPress, you get an optimal load time regardless if you’ve got a few users or a couple of thousands loading at a similar time. This is often especially important for smaller to medium websites, those that are yet to achieve their traffic potential.

NitroPack is also a great WordPress plugin which has allowed our website to achieve top website speeds and load within a matter of seconds, this is our top rated WordPress speed optimisation plugin.

• The Ecosystem is Big

Want a plugin to boost your SEO? WordPress has one. Searching for a website theme that isn’t utilized by a million other businesses? Yep. WordPress has your back. Due to its large user base, a whole ecosystem of supporting features has sprung up around the CMS platform.

Third parties have made tons of money by creating indispensable widgets, plugins, and themes for WordPress users.

With over 49,000 plugins, users have almost unlimited ability to customize their CMS with precisely the features they require, from selling products to reposting old blog content to social media.

• WordPress Is Mobile Friendly

The concept of having a pleasant and simple experience on your website is that you just want your website visitors to navigate through your site with ease, regardless of what device they access your site.

Older designs tend to render oddly on mobile phones and tablets. But the overwhelming majority of WordPress themes are already mobile-friendly. Theme developers constantly update their themes, and all you have got to do is click a button in your WordPress backend to make sure that you’ve got the most recent version and all its functionality the theme has to offer.

WordPress Migration Services Checklist

Before migrating a WordPress site, here are a few things to keep in mind.

• Design and User Experience (UX)

The key to a good website is creating it for your customers. Regardless of the budget, there’s a way to achieve this! It’s important to track insights, such as web analytics, bounce rate, and session time.

These insights can give you a good idea of how optimised your website is for your user’s experience. You can also regularly ask customers for feedback, either on a rating section of the specific web page/post, through your social media profiles, or through email.

If anything can be improved for optimisation, even if its minor, it should be. Especially because of the level of competition increasing year on year pretty much across every industry.

• Check Your New Hosting Provider’s Functionality

Checking the features of the new host is the first and most significant step to be considered before the migration of a website.

Always choose a reliable web host for the migration.

The possibilities of errors will be reduced if you choose a host with similar features as your current host. These features include operating systems, control panels, etc.

Before undertaking the actual migration, try to play around with these areas on your new hosting provider. Watch some tutorials online. Just try to get a feel for the new hosting provider’s functionality so that you’re not hit with any unnecessary surprises later.

• Ensure All URLs Are the Same

Moving website hosts is an easy process in regards to URLs. It can be done by just moving the files. If the database and URLs are similar you can move by just copying the files and databases. If the database name changes then you need to edit the wp_config.php file.

And if the URL changes then you need to change the home URL and site URL of the database from wp_options from PHPMyAdmin option. When your name changes then there’ll be additional concerns.

Even though the files and database are moved there’ll be some references to the old domain which could remain within the database and might cause an error. So you must take care when changing the URLs. It is important if you are migrating with a new design, that the URL structure and content are the same otherwise you’ll see a decrease in rankings.

• Maintaining the Traffic

One of the most important considerations for site owners is to ensure that there are no drops in traffic. Which means implementing traffic redirects. Map redirects for the blog posts, custom page types, and general pages to the new site using the proper HTTP redirect status so to preserve accrued SEO value and page rank.

Sometimes redirects are required from one page to a different page, while in other cases, redirects involve one group of paths to another.

A WordPress migration shouldn’t mean a loss in traffic, but you’d be surprised how often this occurs for people who don’t take the steps to prevent it. By working with a competent professional, you’ll avoid this issue.

• Check Whether to Reinstall Plugins

During WordPress migration, plugins have equal importance. So we need to think about the plugins before migrating to the WordPress site. The plugins that are used at the source might not be compatible with the destination server – creating a conflict during migration. In such cases, you need to reinstall the plugins to avoid conflict.

It can be a good idea to migrate without the plugins and simply reinstall them when you’ve moved over to avoid any trouble. This may cause a bit of menial work in rejigging everything, but it’s better than things breaking and affecting site functionality.

• Check the File Sizes

You need to take the backup of the files from the old account, before migrating to a WordPress site. For that, you need to check the size of the files and directories. It’ll be difficult to download the files onto the system, if the size of the files is larger in size, as this might cause storage problems.

So to avoid this, use the command to take the backup of files. Before taking the backup you need to remember the size of the files. The backup of the files is stored within the tar format inside the system.

• Check the Size of the Database

It’s important to take a backup of your database and to ensure the size is exactly the same as what is stored on your current server (no change in size) as you could have missed some files. Plus, if anything goes wrong during the migration, you’ll have a backup right there so that no data has been lost.

You can take a backup of the site via PHPMyAdmin or there are plugins such as ‘All-In-One WP Migration’ which allows you to take a backup of the whole site, including the database.

• Maintaining Aftercare

Once your site is live on a new host, it’s important to conduct regular maintenance, especially with a CMS like WordPress, as if you have out-dated plugins it could make your website vulnerable and not function in the correct way.

Our nerds provide a monthly maintenance service so you never have to worry about keeping your site up to date ever again!

Rebuilding a Non-WordPress Site in WordPress

Over the last few years, many people have seen the benefits of WordPress as a CMS. It is reliable, easy to scale, and has many functionalities.

We are experienced in rebuilding sites within WordPress, if you have a website built in Squarespace or Wix and looking for additional functionality for example, we can replicate your design within WordPress to make for an easy migration. Some of the technologies we have rebuilt in WordPress include:

• CraftCMS to WordPress
• Squarespace to WordPress
• Webflow to WordPress
• Wix to WordPress
• Weebly to WordPress
• Godaddy to WordPress
• Shopify to WordPress
• Joomla to WordPress
• Magento to WordPress
• Drupal to WordPress

Rebuilding a non-WordPress site into WordPress can be an arduous task, but it is one we are familiar and comfortable with. Why take your chances on someone less experienced? Your website is one of your most vital assets and should be treated as such.

Why Choose Us?

• We provide a secure & fast WordPress migration with minimum downtime.
• We offer robust, industry-specific & adaptable migration services to SMEs, enterprises & startup businesses across the world.
• We have performed countless WordPress migrations since 2017.
• We’re extremely experienced & can offer you standard website migration to your new hosting provider.
• Whether it’s an old website that you would like to move, or you need a complete website redesign, we are able to assist you migrate your website securely and efficiently.
• We also offer fully managed WordPress Hosting which is secure, carbon neutral and affordable.

We’re sure you’ll be happy with our services, so book a discovery call today to discuss your needs with the nerds!

WordPress Migration Services FAQs

• How long does it take to migrate a WordPress site?

Generally, it takes 2-3 hours to migrate a WordPress site, depending on the size of the website.

• How much does it cost to migrate a WordPress site?

If you want help moving your live WordPress website from one hosting company to a different one, we can help. You don’t need to worry about backups, databases, server config files, or anything else. We’ll get it done for you. It depends on which technology you are migrating your site. We provide custom quotes for migrating a WordPress site. Get in touch with our nerds for a bespoke quote.

• Should my website be live in order to be migrated?

No, your website doesn’t need to be live in order to be migrated. It could be on a development domain or a backup you might have.

• Do I need to backup my website before migration?

No, we will take care of this for you. All we need is access to your live site, our nerds can sort the rest!