Navigating the Perils of Website Migration: A Comprehensive Guide

Website migration from an existing Content Management System (CMS)/ digital platform to another is a business move that promises progress and improvement, but it requires careful planning and navigation to ensure a smooth transition.

What is website migration? 

Website migration is the process of moving your organizational website or multiple websites from one environment to  another. This can involve significant changes—changing website design or structure, refurbishing the overall tech stack, content restructuring, protocol shift from HTTP to HTTPS, platform & CMS.

The importance of website migration

Understanding the true essence of website migration begins by recognizing its significance in the contemporary digital landscape. Some of the key aspects of cms migration are given below: 

Enhanced User Experience: Migrating can improve user experience through a better interface and functionality.

SEO Benefits: With proper planning and execution, SEO rankings can actually improve post-migration.

Security Improvements: Migrating to a secure protocol can protect data and build customer trust.

Scalability: Choosing a CMS that is suitable for your needs can facilitate growth and adaptation to evolving business needs.

Think of website migration as relocating your business to a new office—packing up all your equipment, files, and furniture and moving it all to a brand new location that ensures modern facilities and better environment. It is a process filled with potential opportunities and obstacles. It can be smooth, or it can be marred by data loss and downtime. How you plan and execute the migration determines the outcome.This guide will delve deep into the potential pitfalls you may encounter during a website migration and offer solutions and best practices to overcome the challenges. 

5 things that can go wrong in website migration and how to fix them

The process of website migration comes with its own set of intricate challenges that requires focused solutions. Five key challenges and their corresponding remedies include:

1. Lack of proper planning

Challenge: Lack of proper planning is one of the most common mistakes that leads to project failure. Not having a proper roadmap for site migration could invite a host of challenges and complications. Some of the key issues that can arise from lack planning are:

• Extended downtime during the site migration process. This, in turn, leads to a dip in traffic and loss of revenue.
• Loss of crucial data like content, user account, transaction history, etc.
• Broken links, missing images, and dysfunctional features, resulting in bad user experience, disrupted SEO efforts, etc.
• Susceptible to website insecurities.
• Lack of transparency between team members leading to delay in progress.
• Budget and timeline overrun.

Solution: Regular communication with all stakeholders prevents misunderstandings and aligns expectations.

• Start with setting a clear-cut objective—the reason for site migration and.
• Figure out a timeline. Set your milestones and make sure you have deadlines attached to each.
• Involve relevant stakeholders in every stage of the migration process. Come up with a team that comprises webmasters, SEO experts, Content specialists, UX specialists, etc.
• Do have a contingency plan in place.

2. Abstaining from creating backup

Challenge: Backing up your website data and files acts as a safety net in case you come across an unprecedented crisis while migrating your site. It also allows you to refer to the older version whenever required. But organizations often skip this part by mistake or deliberately choose not to have a backup in place. However, this may have serious repercussions like:

• Losing critical data if something goes wrong like data corruption or accidental deletion. And it becomes equally difficult—and impossible sometimes—to restore the site to its previous state.
• Reconstructing and reconfiguring a website from scratch. This may lead to longer recovery time, extended downtime, decreasing user satisfaction, increased cost, and loss of revenue and reputation

Solution: To mitigate these risks and ensure a smoother and safer site migration process, it’s important to create a full backup of your website’s data, files, and configurations before embarking on that journey. Regularly document progress, and don’t be afraid to revert if necessary. Here are a few key tips for effectively backing up your website data:

• Consistency is key. Schedule regular backups—it could be daily, weekly or monthly, depending on the frequency of updates to your website.
• Make sure you have backup for all the items in your website, which includes databases, files, media, plugins, etc.
• Use reliable backup tools or plugins to automate the backup process. This helps avoid probable human errors the process is prone to when done manually.
• Store backups offsite, preferably in a remote server or cloud storage. This helps protect your backup even if your website’s server experiences issues.
• Encrypt your backup to make sure that sensitive data remain secure, even if the backup files are compromised
• Regularly test your restoration process to check everything works as expected

3. Poorly implemented redirects and deleting internal links

Challenge: Poorly implemented redirects is a major roadblock when it comes to seamless site migration. The team responsible for site migration often forgets redirecting and updating canonical tags while changing the URLs. They also end up deleting internal links sometimes. These issues adversely affect user experience, search engine ranking and overall performance of the website.

Solution: To avoid these issues, you need to audit links regularly to ensure consistency and usability. Here’s a checklist for you:

• Build a comprehensive redirect plan. Add and test all your redirects thoroughly.
• Observe your site performance and indexing on a regular basis.
• Be consistent with reviewing and updating your redirects.
• Identify the key internal links and make sure they are updated in the new site. Check the links thoroughly before and after the migration to make sure they are working properly.

4. Letting crawlers and robots access staging site

Challenge: Search engine crawlers visit your site and go through your pages to highlight them in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Allowing them to access your staging site of your new website can lead to premature indexing, duplicate content, and crawl budget waste.

Solution: To steer clear of these problems, it’s critical to prevent search engines from getting access to the staging site of your new website. Here’s how:

• Use robots.txt file to prevent search engine crawlers from visiting staging sites. Such files guide crawlers to identify which pages are to be excluded from indexing.
• Protect your staging site from unauthorized access with passwords.
• Add “Noindex” meta tags to your staging site’s HTML to signal search engines not to index the content.
• Use HTTP authentication to restrict access to your staging site, requiring a username and password for entry.
• Implement canonical tags on your staging sites pages, specifying the corresponding pages on your live site if required.

5. Forgoing non-HTML assets

Challenge: Failing to include non-HTML assets during site migration, such as images, stylesheets, JavaScript files, and videos, can lead to broken visuals and missing links, diminishing user experience. Without these essential elements, the site may lose its intended layout and interactivity, suffer from slower page loading, and appear incompatible with mobile devices, all of which can negatively affect the website's overall performance and appeal.

Solution: A successful site migration is impossible without moving the non-HTML assets in your new website. Ensure proper migration of the non-HTML assets by:

• Optimizing the assets for the new environment.
• Testing the post-migration functionality, design, performance, and user experience of the website.

Website migration cheatsheet

Keep this cheat sheet handy during the migration process for a smooth and efficient transition:

• Prepare a checklist: Outline the steps and ensure everything is covered.
• Follow best practices: Implement it right from development to security
• Avoid too many changes: Make changes gradually to minimize risk
• Conduct a pilot test:  Check for technical errors to prevent larger issues that might crop up later.
• Ensure server health: Regularly check that servers are operational and in good shape
• Schedule migration during low traffic: Opt for migration during off-peak hours to avoid disruptions 
• Monitor key pages: Meticulously monitor those pages that drives maximum traffic for potential issues
• Backup plan: Always have a backup plan in place for managing contingencies
• Go for outsourcing: For complex tasks consider getting professional Migration Services from reputed vendors

Website migration to a new CMS is not a decision to be made lightly. From planning to execution, it requires careful consideration and meticulous attention to detail. By understanding the potential challenges and following this comprehensive guide, you can make the process smooth and beneficial. A successful content management system migration is more than a technical shift; it's a strategic move towards a more agile, secure, and customer-centric digital presence.

Need help with website content migration? Reach out to us today  and get all the heavy lifting behind the scenes done without stressing it out. Srijan provides top-notch content management service. We offer a smooth, seamless migration experience that will teleport all your website paraphernalia to your new digital pad. Our success stories speak for themselves:

1. Learn how we successfully facilitated a global personal care company to migrate customer brands to Drupal architecture, achieving enhanced process efficiency, control and tracking. Read the full case study here.
2. Discover how we delivered impactful low-code/ no-code site building experiences to a global non-profit organization. Read the full case study here.

Excellence in CMS migration services start with the right expertise. And that’s exactly what we bring to the table.