As your business grows, you will need to implement different strategies to keep up with the growing business from all angles.

Migrating a website is one of the approaches you can take to keep up with your growing business. Maybe you want to enhance your online presence, maybe you want to attract new clients, or maybe you simply want to integrate some new features. These are among the many reasons that can trigger you to migrate your website.

But then, your main concern is the overall costs of migrating a website. Of course, the process is technical and will require you to hire experts, and this requires you to have a set budget to facilitate the whole process. This guide will explore all the insights you need to hear about website migration. Keep reading.

What is website migration?

Website migration is all about moving the website from one hosting plan to another. All the web pages for the older website are then redirected to new pages to maintain the Google ranking of the website.

Note: Developers, designers, and SEO professionals refer to migration differently. While developers and designers interpret migration as an act of moving the entire website to another hosting plan, SEO professionals interpret migration as an activity that enhances your website’s visibility on search engines. In this guide, we are exploring how to migrate the entire website to another hosting plan from a developer or designer perspective.

Different types of website migration

Based on the reasons for migrating the website, there are different types of website migration, as outlined below:

• Migrating the Platform

When your business is growing, you may opt to change the CMS to keep up with the scaling business. This often happens when you want to integrate certain features into the business operations to maximize productivity. Of course, some of the features help reach out to a larger audience and improve overall functionality, thus enhancing productivity.

• Merging websites

This happens when a single business wants to consolidate more than one website for different reasons. For example, when one company buys another company and wants to work together under one big umbrella, they merge to form one big stop shop and serve all the customers effectively.

Again, merging can happen when one business has more than two sites and wants to focus on one brand and stay ahead of the competition, then the merging happens. These instances might happen as well when a business owner wants to cut down on operational costs while enhancing business growth.

• Changing the location

Also known as URL structure changes, this happens when you want to rebrand your business, hence the need to change the name and domain of your website.

Again, the location change happens when you want to target an international audience. For instance, moving your business to America when it is currently located in Europe. You will need to modify several components.

• Design/UX migration

This happens when you want to not only make the UX appealing but also enhance its performance.

While a UX professional can execute the process successfully, you also need to have an SEO expert to give valuable insights on code changes since the whole process affects rankings and indexing.

• Structural migration

When you need to adjust the internal link hierarchy or main navigation, then you will need to execute structural migration. This process is also effective when removing or adding breadcrumb navigation.

• Content migration

Content enhances the online visibility of a business. There comes a time when you need to update or refresh the content to meet the trends and practices in the market, and that is when you perform content migration.

During this process, you can consider removing outdated or irrelevant blogs and content pages or, rather, move these pages to another section of the website.

Why migrate a website? Top reasons

As mentioned before, website migration is often accelerated for a number of reasons, and some of these reasons include the following:

• Platform updates

To keep up with the market changes, you have to execute regular updates on the website platform. At times, these changes are minor, and you can actualize the processes effortlessly. However, there comes a time when new technologies and features come up in the market, and performing basic updates becomes hard. In such instances, you can change the platform to accommodate the new technologies and tools, thus ensuring your business is ahead of the competition and market trends.

• New CMS or eCommerce platform

Many business owners often shift to new content management systems for better performance. Here, you need to define the goals and objectives you need to achieve through your business before selecting your ideal CMS or eCommerce platform that will enable you to achieve these goals.

• Redesigning the website

Redesigning a website may not always require migration. However, in most instances, it will need to change the platforms, domain, and hosting, which might need more work. Nonetheless, website redesign creates a better way of evaluating your business performance and integrating metrics that will enhance future improvements.

• Domain change

Changing the domain is another major reason why business owners migrate their websites. This happens especially when updating the web address or rebranding the business. The process is more like changing the architecture of the content since you have to start from the base of everything.

• Hosting change

When your business has outgrown the current hosting capabilities, or when you have found a reliable and cheaper hosting solution, then it is about time you migrate your website. During the processes, you need to migrate all the databases and files to a new server.

Benefits of website migration to a business

Website migration comes with a set of benefits as outlined below:

• Better Support – For instance, selecting a reliable hosting provider provides customer support, offering technical help at any given time, and creating the reliability and effectiveness of the website.
• Cost Savings – when you migrate to a cheaper yet reliable hosting solution, you cut down on overhead and hosting costs, thus helping you divert your finances to some other processes that can help grow your business even higher.
• Scalability – choosing a flexible hosting platform gives your business the flexibility to handle growth and huge traffic without experiencing issues. This, in turn, scales your business to higher levels.
• SEO Benefits – Good SEO performance is key to any business. A well-planned website migration can help improve or maintain SEO rankings, thus enhancing online visibility, accessibility of the site, organic traffic, better performance, and improved security.
• Improved Management – For instance, a new CMS – content management system or a new platform can offer a better way to streamline the processes while promoting an easy workflow environment.
• Access to New Features– Migrating or updating your hosting plan to another platform offers access to new and advanced technologies, tools, resources, and features that promote user engagement and the overall performance of the website.
• Improved Performance – Migrating to a fast-performing hosting solution positively impacts the speed and performance of the website. In the end, SEO rankings and user experiences will be top-notch.
• Cost Savings – Sometimes, you need value for your investment, and when you migrate to a cost-effective hosting solution, you reduce overhead costs and hosting expenses, thus enjoying the services while getting value for your investment.
• Enhanced Security – Many online businesses are prone to cyber threats. Migrating to a secure hosting solution ensures your website is protected against all forms of cyber-attacks, hence preventing downtime and data breaches.

The process of migrating a website

The process of migrating a website takes place in three phases: pre-migration migration, and post-migration, as described below:

Pre-Migration phase

Under the pre-migration phase, you need to execute the following actions:

• Crawl the existing site – Use a website crawler to access your website’s URL and markup. This will give you a URL mapping and an option to retrieve something in case it gets lost later in the process. You can use a third-party tool such as Screaming Frog to crawl the website.
• Benchmark recording – The benchmarks help in retaining all the data in case the data is erased during the migration process.
• URL mapping – this will help guide users from the old to the new URL, especially if your main focus is on changing the site’s URL. This helps avoid users getting the “404 error” prompt when navigating through your site. Instead, they get redirected to the new page without facing any challenges.
• Keep the HTLM markup, meta description, and titles accurate – During the migration process, strive to ensure uniformity across all the pages. This helps in organizing the website. Even if you need to rewrite the HTML, meta descriptions, and titles, ensure all the pages have accurate information.
• Try the new build using a test serve – you can now test the process in a local environment to review how the new site will be in terms of functionality and determine the implementations you need to execute.
• Set the migration data – Now, to avoid rushing, set an appropriate date that will enable you to execute the migration process seamlessly.

Migration phase

When you are ready to migrate the website, perform the following activities:

• Update the DNS settings for your site – if you are migrating the site to another server, start by pointing to the new location for the website. Here, you will require new & old hosting providers and tech teams to execute these processes.
• Launch – Put in place appropriate forwarding redirects, unpublish, and then execute the process.

Note: If you made DNS changes, then expect some downtime. However, if you are not changing platforms or servers, the process will occur instantly.

• Crawl the new site – Immediately after the new site is up, perform crawling to determine if everything is in place. Take note of crawlability and indexability at this point.
• Identify and resolve missing & duplicate content – Analyze the crawl report and find any errors such as broken links, 404 errors, and duplicate content and resolve the issues, if any. Don’t forget to click on the new site to identify any possible issues.
• Check for redirect chains – at this point, you’ve migrated your site successfully. However, you have many new redirects to handle. If the redirects were already there, then there could be chains, and you need to resolve this.
• Implement Google Analytics and Google Search Console – these two should run seamlessly on the same day to avoid gaps in reports and data.
• Mark the date in Analytics – With Google Analytics, you can create annotations of important events or dates. This information helps analyze performance in pre- and post-migration processes.
• Submit sitemaps – At this point, everything is on point and running smoothly. Once you verify there are no errors in your XML site; you can submit a sitemap in Google Search Console to enable Google to crawl the new changes.

Post-Migration phase

Once you have completed all the processes and checks on website migration, you still need to execute some actions in the post-migration phase, which include the following:

• Monitor performance – Keep a keen eye on analytics to ensure the site performs well and that nothing goes wrong during the migration process.
• Perform site audits – Here, you may need to integrate some third-party tools, such as SEMrush’s site auditor, to discover detailed issues you didn’t notice before.
• Update your platforms – Add fresh links to some of your other platforms or if you are running ads on your website.
• Have publishers update backlinks – Get in touch with your publishers and let them know of the updates you’ve made to the site so that they can also use the latest URL for effectiveness.

The costs of migrating a website

The cost of migrating a website varies depending on the following factors:

• Type of migration
• Complexity of the process
• Size of the website
• The team working on the migration process.

Nonetheless, a simple website migration task will cost between $1,000 and $5000 to execute the whole migration process.

A complex migration process, on the other hand, will cost between $5,000 and $20,000 to execute the whole process.

Note: Before you start the migration process, always plan, define the objectives you want to achieve, and create a roadmap you want to follow to ensure the whole process turns out successfully. This will enable you to estimate accurate costs of migrating your website.

Conclusion

Website migration is a common practice for businesses that want to scale higher, improve performance, cut down on costs, and enrich their online visibility.

While the process can be complex and lengthy, it doesn’t mean it is hard to accomplish. With the expert web development company like Aalpha Information Systems, and the right plan, you can achieve a seamless website migration process without encountering any technical issues along the way.