How We Migrated This Website Without Impacting SEO

Our Approach

Understanding the Client’s Needs: We started by thoroughly assessing the existing site, documenting all SEO-related issues, and identifying the new functionalities required for the redesign.

Creating a Staging Site

We created a staging environment to test all changes without impacting the live site. This allowed us to safely replicate the existing site and implement design and functionality changes.

Pros:

• Safe environment for testing.
• No disruption to the live site during development.

Cons:

• Additional resources required.
• Sync issues between staging and live sites are possible.

Replicating the Existing Site

Next, we replicated the entire site in the staging environment, ensuring all content, functionality, and design elements were intact. During this phase, we also de-indexed the staging site to prevent content duplication.

Changing the Theme

The client required a new, faster, and SEO-friendly theme that would also be regularly updated. We carefully selected a theme that met these criteria and addressed the technical SEO issues from the old theme.

Pros:

• Updated design, improved engagement.
• Potential for better speed and SEO performance.

Cons:

• Possible compatibility issues with existing content.
• Learning curve for new theme features.

Custom Development and Redesign

Our team conducted extensive custom development, optimizing the design using CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. We worked closely with the client for approvals, ensuring all elements met their standards. Simultaneously, we worked on optimizing the site’s speed using Litespeed, Perfmatters, and CDN.

Technical SEO Audit

A detailed technical SEO audit was performed to address existing issues. This included fixing canonical tags, pagination errors, redirects, and ensuring optimal indexing.

Tools Used:

• Google Search Console
• Screaming Frog
• Ahrefs

Implementing SEO EEAT

We enhanced the site’s SEO by implementing Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) principles, focusing on content quality, author credentials, and transparency. Additionally, we optimized the internal linking structure.

Tools Used:

• LinkWhisper
• Schema Markup

Further Enhancements

• HTML Tag Consistency: All HTML tags, including meta descriptions, title tags, and header tags, were carefully preserved during migration to ensure consistency and avoid SEO ranking drops.
• Maintaining URL Structure and Indexing: We retained the existing URL structure to prevent indexing issues, ensuring that all pages were properly mapped to the new site without any 404 errors.
• Mapping URLs and Comparing Crawls: We mapped every URL from the old site and compared crawls to ensure accurate migration, eliminating the risk of broken links.
• Replacing the Site and Final Crawls: After everything was in place, we replaced the live site with the staging version. We conducted final crawls to identify and fix any remaining issues.
• Client Revisions: We maintained close communication with the client for feedback and revisions, incorporating their suggestions and refining the final product.
• Final Fixes: Post-launch, minor fixes were applied to ensure everything was running smoothly.