
Businesses scaling up or adopting new technology may need to switch website platforms. However, website migrations pose significant SEO hazards.
A platform move can dramatically reduce organic traffic, income, and market share without adequate SEO planning and implementation.
Avoid these 12 SEO mistakes during website platform changeover.
1. Neglecting to create a migration plan
Switching platforms requires a detailed plan, like any large endeavor. When possible, SEOs should join early, giving them time to:
- Align with product and engineering.
- Map out technical and content requirements.
- Provide ongoing guidance and assistance with pre- and post-migration QA.
Every comprehensive migration plan should include a checklist for technical SEO, content, page speed and performance, analytics benchmarking, and more.
2. Sloppy information architecture
Migration allows reset. We recommend reassessing your SEO setup and identifying areas for improvement, such as information architecture, taxonomy, and navigation.
Simple, intuitive information architecture is better than obsolete or complicated. However, functional site navigation that increases organic traffic is a plus. Changes should be implemented slowly and monitored.
System shock is nearly always caused by a quick overhaul. User behavior and link equity distribution can change due to basic navigation and browsing path changes.
- A shift in PageRank.
- A decrease in long-tail traffic.
- Fluctuations in keyword rankings and organic traffic.
Large sites with significant organic market share in their niches are especially at risk.
A classifieds website reduced and streamlined its category tree during a platform change several years ago without understanding it was a major organic traffic source.
They lost approximately 40% of the SEO market share and haven’t recovered.
3. Overzealous content pruning
Site migrations allow marketers to check for content gaps, redundancy, and obsolete or irrelevant material.
This stage frequently involves significant content trimming because retiring portals and blogs is easier than migrating them.
A strategic approach to updating, preserving, consolidating, and retiring content is preferable to harsh pruning that may lead to content elimination and traffic loss.
Reviewing content inventory regularly is good. It should be done instead to avoid building up abandoned and unmaintained pages.
4. Sloppy 301 redirects
Even with a great 301 redirection approach, short-term traffic loss is practically assured, preventing SEO parity pre- and post-migration.
Sloppy or absent 301 redirects will permanently lose traffic.
Take care to map 301 redirections to maintain link equity and make the transition pleasant for users and search engines. This includes:
- Updating all internal links to the new URL structure.
- Removing any redirect chains.
5. Overlooking on-page SEO elements
A website redesign is a crucial aspect of many migrations.
Work with UX and engineering teams to guarantee consistent page layout and labeling of fundamental elements such as titles, headings, breadcrumbs, and metadata across all indexable page types and landing pages.
Be careful with structured markup and preserve crucial parts on the page and in HTML.
6. Forgetting about mobile
Seven years after Google announced its mobile-first Indexing transition, the initiative is now complete. Many sites, especially those that rely on desktop users, neglect mobile optimization.
During a significant platform move, SEO can suffer as resources are focused on revenue-driving initiatives.
Testing mobile responsiveness and parity across major features and on-page elements is crucial. Pay careful attention to mobile internal connectivity.
A well-optimized mobile experience is crucial to SEO success because Google mostly indexes and ranks mobile material crawled with the smartphone agent.
7. Slow page load times
Newer doesn’t always mean speedier. Effective optimization for page loading speed, user experience, and Core Web Vitals metrics needs a thorough understanding of page elements and their impact on performance.
New designs and frameworks present performance challenges. Solutions can take months of committed work, including incremental adjustments, optimization, and testing.
Thus, optimize long before launch. Inspire designers and engineers to prioritize performance.
8. Crawlability and indexing bugs
Crawlability and indexing concerns are major SEO migration challenges.
An omission makes key page components or navigation uncrawlable.
Whole directories or page types are mistakenly forbidden in robots.txt, indexed via directives, or bulk canonicalized to the home page.
This can happen anytime, but it’s most likely to happen during or after a major migration when teams are fixing bugs and other difficulties. Daily monitoring is crucial here.
Large ecommerce marketplaces can lose money from mass indexing flaws. They can wipe out SEO traffic overnight and take weeks or months to recover as Google recrawls, processes, and re-indexes removed information.
9. Not setting up analytics and tracking
Not transferring or setting up tracking scripts like Google Analytics or Search Console can leave you in the dark post-migration.
To monitor website performance and fix issues fast, these tools are crucial.
Better better, design custom dashboards to compare crucial site performance indicators pre- and post-migration.
Specialized analytics dashboards can help you discover and fix issues before they become major ones.
Taxonomy, content consolidation, and pruning can affect user engagement, conversion metrics, time on site, and bounce rates.
If a content consolidation effort increases pageviews and traffic for lower-intent head phrases, a page type’s organic conversion rate may drop.
10. Ignoring XML sitemaps
Regularly updating XML sitemaps helps accelerate the discovery, crawling, and indexing of new URLs.
Sitemaps for each page type, content category, or other criterion can track content discovery and indexing by key segments for a more granular perspective.
11. Overlooking content that shouldn’t be indexed
SEOs focus so much on indexing that we may neglect to exclude non-indexable content.
Besides non-SEO URL parameters and sorting filters, this contains all banned content:
- System folders.
- Order tracking pages.
- Parts of checkout flows.
- Other pages may contain sensitive user data and PII information not meant for the public eye.
Leaking user data has significant reputational and financial consequences. SEOs should take every measure to avoid this.
12. Forgetting post-migration monitoring
Even with the best efforts, things can go wrong. Developers and QA teams learn new platforms and miss bugs.
Issues must be identified soon. Complete migration doesn’t mean work is done.
Success requires close post-launch monitoring, especially:
- Regular crawls.
- Live production QA.
- Assessing key metrics and dashboards, including overall SEO impressions, rankings, CTR, and visibility.
A proactive approach to SEO during website platform changes
Website platform migrations can improve user experience, adopt new technology, and revitalize a brand’s online presence. Without careful planning and implementation, SEO performance can suffer.
Knowing and avoiding the hazards might help you transition and perform well.