WordPress Website Migration Checklist: A Step-by-Step Guide

Having a website migration checklist is essential for a smooth transition when moving your site to a new WordPress Hosting provider. Migrating can be a complex process, especially if you’ve never done it before, involving several steps and potential risks if not performed correctly. This step-by-step guide will walk you through how migration affects SEO, and what goes into a migration checklist, so you don’t miss any important details. By following this list, we’ll help you minimize downtime, maintain your search engine visibility and user experience, reduce bounce rates, and keep your site functional while you make the change for a successful website migration.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• A WordPress migration should maintain or even improve your SEO, but it requires project management to preserve existing SEO elements.
• By conducting an SEO audit, managing redirects, updating internal links, optimizing metadata, and an accurate sitemap, you maintain and improve your site’s search rankings.
• Careful planning is the foundation of a successful WordPress migration, minimizing risks and ensuring a smooth transition.
• The right new host and a properly configured environment ensure compatibility and set the stage for a successful migration.
• Content migration ensures all your valuable data, including posts, pages, and media, are transferred accurately to the new site.
• Proper configuration and thorough testing are necessary for identifying and resolving any issues before going live with the migrated site.
• Managing DNS changes and close monitoring during the transition period ensures your site goes live correctly and helps identify any unforeseen issues.
• Post-migration tasks are crucial for maintaining SEO performance and ensuring a seamless user experience on your newly migrated WordPress site.

How Does Migration Impact WordPress SEO?

Website migration can impact your WordPress site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and organic traffic if not handled correctly. Some potential effects can include:

• Search engines may need time to re-index your website at its new locations, which can lead to a temporary drop in organic search results.
• If you don’t set up redirects correctly, users and search engines may encounter broken links, which can negatively impact your SEO.
• Duplicate content issues can occur if your old and new websites are both accessible during the migration, which can confuse search engines and hurt your rankings. This can be avoided by using the correct canonical tags.

One of the main concerns during all types of website migrations apart from a hosting or domain change, is maintaining your search engine visibility. Having a WordPress website migration checklist, ensures that you preserve your ranking, that all on-page SEO elements, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags, are carried over to the new domain or site, as well as all the content and databases.

URL Changes

If your migration involves changing your URL structure, you need to implement redirects from the old URLs to new ones. This helps search engines understand the new location of your content and passes on the value to the new pages.

Speed and Performance

The impact of hosting speed is a major ranking factor for search engines. Your new hosting environment and server configuration can impact your site’s performance. For example, if your new host has slower servers than your old one, your website’s page speed may decrease, which has a negative impact on user experience and SEO.

Content and Metadata

Ensure all your content is correctly transferred to the new site. Pay special attention to preserving metadata such as image alt tags, internal linking structures, and schema markup. These elements are how search engines understand and rank your content.

Understanding the above and having a website migration checklist can help maintain or possibly even boost your SEO during the process.

SEO Audit

Before beginning your migration, you need to perform an audit of your current web hosting’s effect on your SEO. This audit should include:

• Analyzing your current search rankings and traffic.
• Identifying your top-performing pages and keywords.
• Listing all current meta titles, descriptions, and header tags
• Checking for any existing issues or penalties.

Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or other software to gather this data. This audit will help with checking your site’s SEO performance after the migration and identifying any issues affecting your search engine rankings.

1: Pre-Migration Planning

Before starting the WordPress website migration checklist, process the next step is to define your goals and objectives, such as better performance, cost savings, or new features along with an an analysis of your current hosting specifications.

Set a timeline for completion and choose a time for the migration, preferably during a low-traffic period in case of any unplanned downtime or issues. Finally, inform team members, visitors, and customers about the upcoming change, via email or social media depending on which works best for your business.

Site Audit and Inventory

Next, conduct a comprehensive audit of your entire site to understand its structure, content, and technical components. This should include a complete list of all web pages, posts, and media files (images, videos, etc.).

It must also have all installed plugins and themes (both active and inactive) along with any custom code, functions, or modifications. This inventory will serve as a big part of your site migration checklist during the migration so that nothing gets left behind.

Make note of all your existing site’s configurations, including theme and plugin settings, and custom code modifications. This will let you set up your site on the new server faster and help with a successful site migration.

Backup Current Website

Creating a complete backup of your current website acts as a safety net in case anything goes wrong during the actual transfer.

A full backup for SEO contains an export of your entire site, database, and copies of all files, including WordPress core files, themes, plugins, and content uploads, from your current web server.

Keep in mind that you should save your wp-config.php file separately, as it contains important configuration information. Always test your backups and make sure you can easily restore your old site before proceeding with the migration.

Use a Staging Environment

A staging environment provides a safe space to test your website migration without affecting your live site. Many hosting providers offer built-in staging areas, if yours doesn’t, you can use a plugin like WP Staging.

Copy your live site to the staging environment, replicating your content, themes, plugins, and database, and test the migration process step-by-step.

Doing a practice run first can minimize risk and let you iron out any problems like broken links, conflicts, or compatibility problems preventing accidental damage to your live site.

2: Setting Up the New Environment

With your preparation complete, it’s time to set up your site’s new environment. First, you need to have a hosting provider that meets your WordPress site’s performance, security, and scalability needs.

Once you’ve selected and signed up with your new host, create a fresh WordPress CMS (Content Management System) installation on the new server. Ensure you use the same version as your current site to avoid compatibility issues.

Configure your new hosting settings to match your current environment as closely as possible. This includes the same PHP version as your current site, high enough memory limits, and any specific server-side configurations your site or plugins require.

3: Content Migration

The core of a successful migration is moving your content such as layout, blog posts, pages, and images, from the old website to the new one. This includes making sure the website structure stays intact and transfers accurately unless you are doing a site redesign.

Export and Import Database

The first step in content migration is exporting your database from your old host. This database contains all your posts, pages, comments, user information, and settings.

Access your WordPress database through phpMyAdmin or a similar database management tool and select all its tables. Click the “Export” button, select the SQL format for easy import later, and save the exported file to your computer. If your database is large, you can split it into smaller sections to avoid timeout issues during export and import.

Once you’ve exported your database, it’s time to import it into your new WordPress installation:

1. Access the database management tool (e.g., phpMyAdmin as before) in your new hosting account.
2. Create a new database if one hasn’t been set up already.
3. Select the newly created database and choose the import option.
4. Upload and execute the SQL file exported and saved from your old site.

After importing, you may need to update the site URL in the database if you’re moving to a new domain. This can be done through WordPress’s built-in settings or by directly editing the database.

Transfer Files and Media

While the database contains your content and user information, you need to transfer all your files and media to complete the migration. Connect to your old and new sites using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client or your host’s file manager in their control panel.

Download the files from your old server, excluding the database, and upload them to the corresponding directories on the new one. If you’ve modified any core files, transfer those changes carefully. Be careful not to overwrite any new WordPress core files if you upgrade to a newer version during the migration to avoid conflicts.

Confirm all files have been transferred completely and aren’t corrupted and check file permissions to ensure they’re set correctly. Large media libraries may take a long time to transfer but using a tool like rsync can help speed it up.

4: Configure and Test

After migrating your content, it’s time to configure your new WordPress site and test it in the staging area before going live.

Update your WordPress wp-config.php file with the new database credentials (DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, DB_HOST) provided by your host and any custom settings you had on the website architecture.

Access your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Settings. Update the site URL and IP address URL if you’ve done a domain name change and update the Permalinks structure to maintain SEO. Check and change the time and date format, and other general settings if need be.

Review your inventory list created before the migration and reinstall and configure all necessary plugins and themes to match your previous setup, ensuring they’re compatible with your new environment. Keep in mind caching, security, and performance plugins may require additional setup.

Conduct extensive testing of your site’s functionality and appearance to make sure all content changes have migrated correctly, and images and videos are displaying properly.

Check all pages, posts, forms, and interactive elements to ensure they work as expected, including ecommerce functionality (product pages, cart, checkout) if applicable.

Test on both desktop and mobile devices to verify responsiveness and cross-browser compatibility. Finally, use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to check site speed, server response times, and resource usage (CPU, RAM, storage) from new content.

5: DNS and Going Live

When you’re happy your new site is running correctly, it’s time to go live. Update your domain’s DNS (Domain Name System) records to point to your new web server, which tells the internet where to find your website.

Get the new IP address or nameservers from your new hosting provider and access your domain service’s control panel.

Locate the DNS management section and update the A Record with the new IP address, or nameservers if required. If you use a CDN (Content Delivery Network), update your CNAME records accordingly.

DNS propagation can take up to 48 hours, though it’s often much faster. There might be a period where some users might see the old site while others see the new one.

Implement an SSL certificate on your new site to encrypt data transfers and update your site URL in WordPress settings to use HTTPS. Many hosting providers offer free SSL certificates and will install them on the server for you.

Perform final checks once the DNS changes have propagated, especially if you have done a domain migration. Monitor your site after going live, watching for any functionality, performance, or migration SEO issues. Check Google Search Console for any crawl errors or security issues.

6: SEO Migration Checklist

After your site is live on the new platform, there are several important tasks to complete in the site migration process, especially to maintain your ranking and SEO strategy.

301 Redirects

Create a detailed 301 redirect map to preserve your site’s link equity and user experience. Proper 301 redirects will help maintain your SEO rankings and ensure that users and search engines can find your content at the new location. This involves listing all current URLs on your site with the corresponding new URLs that will change after migration.

Make sure you pay special attention to your landing pages, the most important pages, and the ones with the highest traffic, and test them all on the new site after implementation.

Update Links

After migration, you need to update internal links to reflect your new URL structure. This includes links in your content, navigation menus, sidebar, and footer as well as any external links.

While 301 redirect chains can handle these changes, updating internal links directly can improve site performance and user experience. Use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl your old site and compare it with the new one to identify any missing or remaining internal links pointing to old URLs.

Meta Titles and Descriptions

In addition to technical SEO, during migration, there’s a risk of losing or changing important on-page SEO elements. Take this opportunity to review all meta titles and descriptions. Ensure they’ve been correctly transferred to the new server and update and optimize where necessary. This process not only preserves your existing SEO but also lets you improve your on-page optimization without making significant changes.

New XML Sitemap

A current, accurate XML sitemap helps search engines crawl and index your new site structure better and faster. After completing the migration and all your content is in the right place, generate a new XML sitemap for your site.

Then submit the new one to Google Search Console or use Bing Webmaster tools, ensuring it includes all your new URLs. Make sure to remove references to old or invalid URLs to prevent issues with newly indexed pages.

FAQs

Other Articles of Interest

– WordPress Migration and Hosting: Tips and Best Practices

– A Clear Guide To Migrate WordPress Sites Seamlessly

– Best SEO Hosting for WordPress Sites: What to Look For

– Website Migration Costs Associated With WordPress Websites

– Optimizing Your Site: SEO Hosting Advantages of Managed WordPress