If the thought of losing your organic search engine rankings due to an unintentional mistake during a website migration makes your heart skip a beat, you're not alone.
In fact, everyone who has ever migrated a website has felt that way at some point.
However, this fear can be addressed by learning about the common site migration mistakes and intentionally avoiding them.
In this guide, I asked our website migration lead at Edgerank Agency, Peace David, about the costly mistakes he made in the past and other common mistakes people make when migrating a website.
Fortunately, he shared them without holding back, and I will also generously share them with you so you can avoid these common SEO mistakes and migrate your website safely.
11 Common Mistakes in Website Migration
Common site migration mistakes include neglecting to audit your current SEO performance, ignoring www vs. non-www redirects, forgetting to back up your website data, failing to install an SSL certificate, allowing website downtime during migration, and more.
Here is a more comprehensive list:
- Migrating without auditing your current SEO performance
- Ignoring www vs non-www redirects
- Forgetting to back up your website data
- Failing to install an SSL certificate
- Allowing website downtime during migration
- Leaving your staging environment open for Google crawlers to index.
- Forgetting to unblock Google crawlers after migration
- Redirecting all pages of the old website to the home page of the new website
- Leaving 404 and other error pages on your new website
- Migrating to a low-performance hosting server
- Ignoring SEO best practices during migration.
How to Avoid Common Website Migration Mistakes
1. Migrating Without Auditing Your Current SEO Performance
This is the most common reason why most brands lose their hard-earned search engine rankings overnight. They jump straight to migrating without auditing their current SEO performance.
The implication is that it makes it impossible to measure the success of the migration, as you have no baseline to compare the before-and-after results. You can also accidentally lose your performing pages with lots of external backlinks and high rankings by accidentally deleting them during the migration or forgetting to implement proper 301 redirects. You also risk migrating any hidden technical issues on your old website to your new one.
How to Avoid
- Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to identify top-linked pages, keyword rankings, and organic traffic. This is the baseline you’ll use to measure the migration's success.
- Use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl the entire website and create a new spreadsheet with two primary columns: old URL and new URL. This makes it easy to map the old URL to its equivalent URL on the new page to avoid 404 errors.
2. Ignoring WWW vs. Non-WWW Redirects
According to our SEO migration lead, most people lose their hard-earned backlinks, face duplicate content issues, and amass several broken internal links simply because they fail to properly configure their www and non-www versions of their domain.
For instance, migrating your website and leaving it accessible via https://yourdomain.com without properly redirecting https://www.yourdomain.com (or vice versa) can cause serious problems.
Here is why: search engines treat these as separate versions of your site. Without proper 301 redirects, your website authority becomes diluted, which can negatively impact rankings.
How to Avoid
- Choose your preferred version. Either https://yourdomain.com or https://www.yourdomain.com works fine. Just choose one and stick to it.
- Implement 301 redirect. I.e., if you want to add “www.” to your domain, redirect it from “https://yourdomain.com” to “https://www.yourdomain.com.”
- Test the redirect to ensure it's working properly. I.e., if you choose the “www” version, try visiting the non-www version to confirm it redirects to your actual domain.
3. Forgetting to Back Up Your Site Data
Most people assume their migration process will be smooth; however, things can quickly go south. For instance, database imports can fail, and files can get corrupted. Without proper backup, you will lose your website data.
How to Avoid
- Back up all your files, email accounts, databases, media assets, etc.
- Store them in at least 2 secure locations: local storage and cloud storage. This ensures that if one fails, you can rely on the other.
4. Failing to Install an SSL Certificate
Another critical mistake that can lead to lower search engine rankings and higher bounce rates after a website migration is failing to install an SSL certificate.
Security is a confirmed ranking factor on Google, and websites without an SSL certificate are flagged as “Not Secure” by browsers. Therefore, leaving your new site to run on HTTP instead of HTTPS can quickly backfire.
How to Avoid
Always install and configure a valid SSL certificate immediately after migration. Ensure all URLs are redirected from HTTP to HTTPS using 301 redirects.
5. Allowing Website Downtime During Migration
“If you don’t want to lose sales and make search engines temporarily de-index your pages, do not take your live (production) website down during migration.” Our SEO migration lead warns.
First, users who want to visit your site during that period will be unable to access it, which is a lost lead or sale you might never get back. It also signals to search engines that you're unreliable, especially if it remains inaccessible for too long.
How to Avoid Downtime During Website Migration
Use a staging environment to perform your migration. This allows you to test everything thoroughly before pushing changes live, ensuring zero or minimal downtime.
6. Leaving Your Staging Environment Open For Google Crawlers to Index
A staging environment is where you build and test your website before going live. However, most people (in fact, our migration expert once) forget to restrict Google crawlers from indexing the staging environment, which can cause serious issues, such as the following:
- Revealing sensitive details such as user data, unreleased product details, or any other information you don’t want the public to access.
- Duplicate content issues if it is a copy of your live website, which can cause the wrong version (the staging site copy) to rank higher than the live version.
- Leading to poor user experience for visitors who land on an incomplete or outdated version of your website.
How to Prevent Google Crawlers From Indexing Your Staging Environment
1. Add a disallow rule to your `robots.txt` file.
``` User-agent: * Disallow: / ```
2. Add an .htaccess login to your site. This ensures only people with a valid username and password can access it. Check out this guide to add an `.htaccess` login to your staging site
7. Forgetting to Unblock Google Crawlers After Migration
While it is important to block Google crawlers from indexing your staging environment, forgetting to unblock it after you go live could cause disaster. The implication is that your new site will not be indexed or appear in search result pages, which can lead to 99% drop in organic traffic and loss of sales, especially if you rely on online visibility
How to Avoid
- Remove the noindex tags and the Disallow: / command from the robots.txt file when you go live.
- Use Google Search Console to monitor your “Crawl Stat” to ensure Google crawlers are not encountering any errors.
8. Redirecting All Pages of the Old Website to the Home Page of the New Website:
Redirecting massive pages to your home page is tempting because it is convenient. However, this can lead to severe consequences for your website. It confuses Google and users and can lead to lost authority.
For instance, if you have pages with high backlinks and high search rankings, redirecting them to your homepage can dilute authority to the wrong place because it lacks contextual relevance. It can also confuse users who follow the URL and land on an unexpected home page.
How to Redirect Old Pages
- Implement a 1-1 redirect. i.e., redirect old URLs to a relevant URL on your new website.
- Use a 410 status code if it's permanently removed.
9. Leaving 404 and Other Error Pages on Your New Website
According to our SEO migration lead, 404 error pages are normal during a website migration. However, leaving it unattended can affect your site’s SEO performance and result in lost leads, especially on important pages.
How to Fix Error Pages on Your New Website After Migration
Step 1: Use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl your entire website
Step 2: Implement a 301 redirect to the new relevant URL
Step 3: Update Internal Links pointing to the broken URL.
Step 4 (optional): Reach out to sites that linked to the broken page and offer an equivalent replacement to preserve link authority.
10. Migrating to a Low-Performance Hosting Server
“I have seen many brands migrate to a cheaper hosting provider to cut down on costs; however, it can quickly backfire if you don’t evaluate performance.” Edgerank SEO migration specialist warns.
It can lead to slower page loading times and, by extension, lower your search rankings since it’s a ranking factor.
Therefore, before migrating, compare hosting performance such as:
- Hardware resources of the new server compared to the old one
- New server response time
- Uptime reliability of the new server
- Scalability of the new server
In summary, prioritize performance over cost to maintain and improve your SEO rankings.
11. Ignoring SEO Best Practices During Migration
Another mistake that can make you lose your search rankings and organic traffic, and that still takes about 3 to 6 months to recover, is ignoring SEO best practices during website migration. This includes forgetting to migrate meta descriptions, canonical tags, and title tags to your new website.
SEO Best Practices to Keep in Mind During Website Migration
- Export your metadata, including descriptions, tags, and titles, to your new site.
- Use tools like Screaming Frog to identify any SEO-related issues, ranging from the risky errors that can affect your search rankings to minor ones, and fix them.
How to Migrate a Website Without Losing Your Mind
Website migration can feel like a lot of work, especially if you're doing it for the first time or you're not a technical person. One wrong move can cause disaster and make you question why you decided to do it in the first place.
However, you can outsource the whole migration process to website migration experts at Edgerank Agency. They have successfully migrated 20+ websites without sacrificing SEO rankings during the move. The migration timeline is pretty fast, taking 1 to 3 days, depending on your site's complexity.
Remember the advice we mentioned earlier? “Do not take your live (production) website down during the migration”—that is our site migration mantra. We implement a zero-downtime migration that keeps your live website running throughout the process.
Beyond the convenience, you also no longer have to worry about mistakes to avoid or a website migration checklist to tick because experts can handle the whole process for you.
Conclusion
Website migrations are scary, no doubt. However, knowing the common website migration mistakes before you even proceed will save you from losing your search rankings.
In this guide, the Edgerank SEO migration lead shared common SEO mistakes in website migration and how to avoid them. You can also outsource the site migration directly to Edgerank Agency if you don’t have the capacity to implement it in-house.
Either way works. To outsource your website migration, contact the Edgerank migration team here.
Frequently Asked Questions About Website Migration
How Much Does a Website Migration Cost?
Website migration costs vary depending on the website's complexity. For instance, a simple website migration can cost $100 to $500, while e-commerce sites can cost $600 to $2000.
How Can I Check for Errors on My Website
To check for errors on your website, use tools like Google Search Console to monitor indexing, site health, and security. You can also use Screaming Frog to identify broken links, error pages, and other technical SEO issues.
What is the Biggest SEO Risk During Website Migration?
The biggest SEO risk during website migration is losing high-quality backlinks and organic search rankings. However, you can avoid it by implementing proper 301 redirects
Which Agency Can Migrate My Site From Squarespace to WordPress?
The best agency to migrate your site from Squarespace to WordPress is Edgerank, and here is why. This team of experts implements best SEO practices during the migration so you don’t lose your search rankings and offers a zero-downtime strategy, ensuring your website stays up throughout the migration.
What are the Top Technical SEO Agencies for Site Migrations?
The top technical SEO agencies for website migrations are Edgerank Agency, Idea Hills, and Suso Digital. These agencies preserve search engine rankings during website migration with zero downtime.
