In a previous tutorial, we talked about the different issues of WordPress migration, presenting everything you need to know. Today, we will go further by preparing the migration of SEO as well. Remember that one of the downsides of migration is that you can lose your ranking on Google, which is why you need to do things right.
We suggested in our previous tutorial to split the migration process in two. We are going in this tutorial to talk about the Pre-Migration phase.
Getting Started: Pre-Migration to WordPress
Test your server
If you are setting up the new site on a staging environment for testing, then you need to make sure that the search engines can not explore this test site. The best way to do this is to block the search engines using the robots.txt file.
This file should be placed at the root of your staging environment. For example, if your test site is on a subdomain, the robots.txt file would be located at http://test.example.com/robots.txt. You must have the following directive in your robots.txt file to block the search engines on your site:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
Setting up Google Analytics and Webmaster
You need to make sure you have set up Google Search Console, as well as an analytics platform. A popular solution and is the Google Analytics solution. If you don't have the analytics setup for your site, you should consider doing it now. It can provide accurate information about the behavior, acquisition and conversion of your visitors. You will need these tools for pre-migration tasks and post-migration tasks.
Identify all current issues on SEO
At this point, you will also need to identify any SEO concerns that your website might have. This step is especially important if either your theme is being edited and / or the content is being updated. By finding out what the problems are early on, you can make sure you avoid these errors on the new site.
If you have the budget, you can call on a specialist in SEO or to an agency to help you identify problems. If not, then there are a number of tools SEOas an Woorank (free try) and Onpage.org (free for 100 URL), which can help you identify problems with SEO common.
SEO Plugins Worth Checking Out
Your site is active and you use an SEO plugin? If not, it's now a good idea to either start using one or consider using one after the site migration. The WordPress plugins SEO can help with a number of tasks, such as controlling which pages are indexed, XML sitemap generation, and editing metadata.
Record your current SEO performance
You want to be able to see what worked and what didn't after the migration. To do this, you will need to know how your site works before you migrate your website. You can use both “Google Search Console” and your analytics platform to get a good idea of your search performance.
With " Google Search »Console, you want to save the following settings:
- Click analysis
- The impressions
- click rate (CTR)
- The visitor locations
- The internal links
Search Console only stores Google Analytics data for 90 days. If you want to compare data across months, especially at the granular keyword and landing page level, data from the last 90 days might not be enough. Preventively, you can download the data from your blog.
You should also download the internal links report. You can compare it with the “post-migration” data if you have any problems and this report may be helpful.
If you are using an analytics platform, try to collect data for at least a few months before the migration. This should give you a reasonable amount of data for comparison.
That's it for today, we will continue with the pre-migration elements in an upcoming tutorial. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask.
