Balancing risk, reaping reward
Website migrations are often a necessary evil; but they need to be planned and executed well. We have successfully migrated numerous websites, platforms, and frameworks to Drupal, WordPress, and Laravel. We can help with simple like-for-like migrations with minimal content freeze to full scale content rearchitecting and selective migration. As well as the technical side of migration, we have specific expertise in SEO, which can be a critical part of migration. During a website migration, it's often crucial to preserve and transfer SEO equity to the new environment to maintain search engine rankings and organic traffic.
Why do I need to migrate?
Migrating to a different or new CMS offers the perfect opportunity to reevaluate where you're heading. You should be thinking about how you can enhance your online presence, improve user experience, streamline content management, and stay up-to-date with the latest security and design standards. It's a strategic move that allows you to align your website with your evolving business needs and industry trends. But opportunities aside, there are situations where you might be forced to migrate to a new CMS. An impending end-of-life for your current CMS, limited scalability, poor user experience, vendor lock-in, high costs, or changing business requirements can all force your hand towards migration to a new CMS.
Planning the migration
We consider the technical and content structure of your source system, and how that fits with the target CMS architecture. This may include auditing of functionality, integrations, content, and SEO.
Export & transformation
If required, we'll extract data from the current CMS, including pages, posts, images, metadata, and other relevant content. We may then convert your exported data into a format compatible with the new CMS. This may involve restructuring content, updating metadata, configuring or even rebuilding functionality.
Design refresh?
We can take the existing design over to the new CMS' templates and layouts. But you may also want to take this opportunity to tweak or completely redesign the site too.
Import, test, and quality assurance
We can import any transformed data into the new CMS, ensuring that all content elements, relationships, and metadata are accurately transferred. We then perform quality checks to verify data integrity and consistency. This is followed by a thorough test of the migrated website to identify and resolve any issues, and verify that all pages, links, forms, and interactive elements are working as intended.
Preserving your SEO equity
During the website migration process, our team consider the following steps to preserve your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) equity:
- Perform a comprehensive SEO audit: Evaluate the existing website's SEO performance, identify important keywords, backlinks, and other SEO elements
- Plan the migration: Develop a migration plan that determines how to handle URL structures, redirects, meta tags, canonicalization, and other SEO elements
- Implement redirects: Properly set up redirects from the old URLs to the corresponding new URLs to preserve rankings and avoid broken links
- Update internal links and sitemaps: Update all internal links and XML sitemaps and submit them to search engines to help them be discovered and indexed
- Monitor and troubleshoot: Closely monitor the website's performance, rankings, and organic traffic
