Five website migration mistakes and how to avoid them
Migrations are a potentially dangerous time for website performance, in particular when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation. When migrations are completed without a thoughtful SEO strategy, they can result in the loss of both rankings and traffic, often leading to a resulting drop in conversions and subsequent revenue. When this happens, recovering lost rankings can be difficult and take quite some time. However, lost traffic is not inevitable when you redesign or relaunch your site! Following a simple migration strategy can help to avoid these negative consequences; at Varn we have plenty of experience working alongside clients to achieve smooth and successful migrations.
We have collated five common mistakes to avoid when planning for your website migration. But first, what do we mean by the term migration?

What is a website migration?
At the most basic level, a website migration involves moving your site from one location to another. That could mean changing your domain, or switching to another hosting environment. Beyond this, you may hear website redesigns or restructures referred to as a migration, because they often involve many of the same elements. If you are planning any kind of refresh or relaunch of your site, it is worth considering whether the common migration pitfalls outlined in this blog are likely to be relevant. If your plans involve changing URL structures, updating the hierarchical structure of your content, removing areas of the site, relaunching products, or consolidating content from different locations, you may find that there are elements of a migration at play.
So, how can you ensure your website migration goes smoothly and to plan? Here are five key migration mistakes to avoid:
1. Ignoring the data
Migrating, redesigning or relaunching a website is an excellent opportunity to rectify any mistakes with your current site strategy, as well as building on existing performance. It is the perfect chance to fix the items that need fixing, whilst consolidating and building on those that are already doing well. Given this, we always recommend a data-driven approach to your migration strategy.
It can be surprising how often redesign decisions are made based on vague inclinations or feelings – especially when solid data is readily available via tools like Google Search Console. For example, when it comes to SEO performance and website migrations, we recommend a thorough review of existing content and organic search performance as an initial step. This will help you to identify the top-performing content to protect in the move, the underperforming pages that can be removed without concern, as well as the keywords that are driving traffic to the website. You may discover that some of the pages you are intending to remove are actually ranking for important SEO keywords, which should be carefully protected in the migration – this may mean rewriting the new website’s content to target these terms. Failing to look at the data during the website planning stage will likely mean that some key opportunities are overlooked, negatively impacting ongoing performance.
2. Inconsistent tracking set ups
Updating your website may be a good opportunity to update your tracking – but be careful here. Changing your GA4 event tracking, or the configuration of your site’s cookie banner during a migration can make it very hard to compare performance pre- and post-launch. It is also very possible for tracking for GA4 or Google Search Console to get ‘lost’ in a migration, which could lead to some downtime in your reporting. Finally, we have seen instances where a new GA4 or Google Search Console account has been set up to go alongside a website migration; whilst this may seem logical and ‘clean’ it actually makes it very hard to maintain visibility of performance over time. Instead, we recommend continuing to use your existing reporting accounts. Ideally, you want to ensure that consistent tracking is in place before and after your launch to allow comparisons between performance, and to help you identify any potential issues which may crop up during the migration process.
3. Incorrect redirect mapping
An important technical element of migrating your website is setting up redirects from existing URLs to their equivalent new counterparts. If your website domain or URL structure is going to be fundamentally different, it may be that every single page on the site needs to be redirected. But even when this is not the case, some content is likely to change, and will need to be identified and covered. It is therefore important to spend some time creating a thorough redirect map for your website; this will involve using a crawling tool to identify all existing URLs and ensuring each has an equivalent on the new website – where there are discrepancies, you will need to select the most appropriate planned URL to redirect to.
We often see the redirect stage get overlooked or incorrectly implemented when it comes to website migrations, and the results can be disastrous, especially in terms of SEO. If search engines have certain pages indexed and are suddenly unable to find this content, you will likely see a steep and sudden drop in both rankings and associated traffic. Therefore it is important to take the time to make sure you get this right!
4. Forgetting to let Google know about the move
There is a very useful tool incorporated into Google Search Console called the ‘change of address tool’ which allows you to notify Google that you are moving your website from one domain to another. By letting the search engine know what you are doing, you can help to protect your rankings and ensure they are reflected on the correct pages on your new site. As well as this direct notification, there are additional indirect ways to help signpost search engines around your new website and make it clear where content has moved. For example, the redirect plan already touched on will make it abundantly clear which pages have moved to new URLs. Elsewhere, it is important to ensure the new website has an up-to-date sitemap which reflects all the pages on the site you would like to see ranking, which search engines can use to discover and explore your content.
5. Failing to review and iterate post-launch
The day your website goes live can be scary; and it is hugely reassuring once everything is live and working correctly. But that’s not the end of the story. It’s important to keep a close eye on your site following your migration, so that you can identify and fix any issues as soon as possible. Immediately after launch, we recommend running thorough site health checks to identify broken links, incorrect content, and ensure all relevant pages are indexable. In the following days and weeks, it is worth carefully tracking performance so that any positive trends can be capitalised upon, whilst negative trends are rectified. And in the long run, a site should be an adaptable, changing entity; constant review, testing and iterations will help you to improve and optimise over time.
Need further help planning for a website migration? The expert Varn team would be happy to help! Get in touch to let us know about your plans and requirements, and have a chat about how we could help.