3 most stressful things in life

Website Migrations

Types of Migration

Domain to Domain - Redesign, upgrade CMS

Merging Domains - Absorbing a network, expansion or purchase

HTTP to HTTPS

Old domain to new domain - Rebranding

Types of Migration

HTTP to HTTPS

56% of all SERP results are HTTPS

70% of all search results will be HTTPS within 2017

https://moz.com/blog/half-page-one-google-results-https

HTTPS Migration Why it’s important

HTTPS Migration

• URLs get lost

What can go wrong?

• Create a redirect loop

• Duplicate site content

HTTPS Migration What can go wrong?

Set up and verify your security certificate

Create benchmarks for Rankings, Site Speed, Traffic, etc

Find your most valuable pages (Traffic and External Links)

Crawl your Legacy site (Screaming Frog, Deep Crawl or Xenu) to get a

full list of URLs

Get a full list of backlinks pointing to your site (Ahrefs, Moz, SemRush,

Search Console)

Create properties in Search Console for secure/non-secure and www/non-

www version of the site (4 properties)

Set Geolocation in the HTTPS SC Properties

Make sure Canonical tags are absolute, not relative (same for

HREFLANG tags)

Create a redirect map of all Legacy URLs, use this opportunity to redirect

weak or low value pages to high value pages (301 Redirects)

Create a new HTTPS Sitemap.xml

Create a new Robots.txt file, reference the HTTPS Sitemap.xml

Check your owned channels (Email, Social, Networks), for HTTP URLs

Update your Paid channels to HTTPS URLs

Verify the GA codes are in place for the new site

HTTPS Migration (Find, and organise your stuff to take it, neatly, to the new

house)

Upload Robots.txt

Upload Sitemap.xml to SC

Ensure Canonical tags (and HREFLANG tags)

indicate the HTTPS URLs

Update all internal URLs to secure versions

Change owned channels to new versions

Change paid channels to new versions

Make Sure tracking tools are monitoring the

HTTPS URLs

HTTPS Migration (Tell everyone your new address)

Use list mode in your crawlers to crawl the Legacy URLs into the new site -

to check for missed/broken redirects

Monitor traffic

Monitor rankings

Fetch as Google and request indexing for main navigation URLs in SC

Monitor backlinks and update any that break (Ahrefs, Moz, SemRush,

Search Console)

Check Search Console (and Moz) for crawl errors

Monitor SERPS for indexed pages

HTTPS Migration (Make sure you left nothing behind)

HTTPS Migration