Site Migration At Enterprise-Level

Site Migration At Enterprise-Level

Enterprise data migration is a complex and critical process that involves moving large amounts of data from one system or platform to another. 

Keeping your business running smoothly during a data migration is crucial. A seamless migration ensures that none of your valuable data gets lost in the shuffle. Losing data can be a major headache, bringing your operations to a halt, costing you a pretty penny, and even landing you in hot water legally. By getting the migration right the first time, you avoid those costly mistakes and the extra work of having to redo things.

• Enterprise data migration involves moving large amounts of data from one system to another, for seamless transition without data loss or disruption
• Proper planning includes assembling a dedicated team, assessing current data infrastructure, and creating a comprehensive migration plan
• Selecting the right migration tools and partnering with experienced experts or consultants for a successful migration process
• Thorough testing and validation of the migrated data, like data validation and rigorous testing across relevant systems, enable accuracy and integrity
• Continuous monitoring, establishing key performance indicators, and periodic evaluations are important for migration success and optimizing new systems over time.

What is Migration Lag?

Migration lag refers to the time period after launching a new website, during which traffic and rankings drop as search engines discover and index the new site. For huge enterprise sites with hundreds of thousands of URLs, this lag can last for months.

For minimizing migration lag, have a solid redirect strategy before the new site launch:

• Prioritizing redirects for high-traffic and high-value pages
• Using wildcards to redirect categories of pages
• Including URL parameter in redirects
• Breaking redirect chains
• Redirecting backlinks
• Accounting for recent redirects

Soft-launch Pre-Migration

John Mueller floated the idea of launching a new domain “early” before the official migration switchover in June 2023.

Defining The Migration Strategy

Define Goals. Be clear on the objectives/aims for developing the best approach.

With the availability of hundreds of thousands of URLs, determine which redirects are most critical to implement first. Focus on pages:

• Homepage, product pages, etc.
• Pages generating a substantial amount of website leads/revenue, either directly or indirectly.
• Pages generating the most organic traffic for the website
• Pages with strong backlink profiles, that are crawled frequently by Google/other search engines, should be prioritized above those with bigger backlink clusters – but it is an objective measure that you need to determine.

Map Content and URL Structure. Reorganizing or reconstructing your content on the new site. Map out which existing URLs would redirect to which new destinations. Group related content and consolidate where possible. The new information architecture should be intuitive and user-friendly.

Redirect Types - 301 permanent redirects are used for the bulk of redirects.

Temporary 302 redirects make sense, particularly if the page content is still being migrated in some cases.

Backlinks in website migration are crucial for maintaining SEO, help to channel traffic to your site, minimizing traffic disruption, and identify pages that receive the most links.

Backlink tools, like Google Search Console, can be used for identifying existing backlinks on your site, which can then be directed to the appropriate new URLs during migration. In addition, backlink regular monitoring ensures that all links continue to function correctly and bring traffic to your site.

Establishing the Migration Project Timelines

Managing a large website migration enable establishment of realistic timelines. You need to plan and be strategic in how you phase the work. It is also important to note that migration timelines are a collaborative effort involving all stakeholders. Businesses are determining an arbitrary deadline without taking into account the feasibility of all teams to complete all necessary actions comfortably in time.

Avoid Phased/Partial Migrations

Avoiding phased or partial migrations is important for managing redirects for an enterprise website. Piecemealing your migration only creates more work and headaches down the road.

Redirecting all URLs at the same time enables:

• No pages are left orphaned without a redirect in place
• There are no redirect chains created that need to be cleaned up later
• All backlinks point to the proper new destination page

Setting up 301 redirects at scale for tens or hundreds of thousands of URLs at an enterprise level require strategic planning.

Tips for tackling this:

• Use wildcards and handling parameters URLs
• Breaking redirect chains
• Historic redirects, particularly those under six months old
• Overcoming redirect limits from CMS or ecommerce platform

Benchmarking Organic Performance (Traffic, Rankings, Indexation)

Determining impact on organic traffic and rankings once redirects have been implemented.

Benchmarking progress would aids in determining further optimization needed. Key metrics to monitor:

• Organic search traffic

Use Google for comparing traffic before and after the migration. Expecting initial drop in traffic enable recovering within one to two months. If significant low traffic observed, then revisit your redirect implementation.

• Keyword rankings

Track the rankings. After migrations, if major drops in ranking that don’t improve could signal redirect or content issues that need to be addressed.

• Indexation

Use of Google Search Console for checking number of new site index or not. It can take Google three to six months to completely recrawl and re-index a big, complicated website. Over time, look for consistent rises in indexation. There can be technical problems preventing Google from accessing portions of your website if indexation lags or drops.

• 404 errors

Monitoring 404 error enable that broke links are redirecting properly. Increased numbers of 404s, particularly old URLs, indicating redirects need to be created or fixed.

• Backlinks

Backlink audit for verifying links pointing to your old site redirecting to the proper new URLs. Failure to redirect backlinks is a common cause of traffic and ranking loss after a website migration.

Benchmarking these important KPIs regularly provides important information about the success of your company website migration and redirect implementation. Make the necessary changes to restore the organic performance of the new site.

Communicating Migration Performance To The C-Level

• Set clear expectations: With executives, set concrete goals and KPIs for the new site. Be transparent that there may be an initial dip in metrics as the new site established itself, and having targets help determine if the migration is meeting business needs after things settle in.

• Share detailed reports: Followed by migration, provide regular reports on how the new site performs compared to the old site and the established KPIs.

• Regularly inform about how the new enterprise website is performing. With open communication and a mix progress reports and wins, executives would remain supportive and engaged in optimizing the site for achieving the best results.