There may be multiple reasons that make you move your website from one CMS platform into another. More often, everything runs into getting more powerful functionality, you would like to have more user friendly site building tool, or other dozens of wishes. In case you made that final decision to perform your website switching, make an effort to do this as flawless and fast as it’s possible.
You should realize the website migration is a many-sided procedure that may be relatively separated into three periods:
- Pre-Migration (We’ve already written on this topic, so in order to make everything properly, go through the checklist carefully)
- Migration Procedure Itself
- Post-Migration
This article will be dedicated to the post-migration steps that will help you make a finishing touching of your website conversion.
Migration Done. What’s Next?
1. Check up Converted Data
First thing you should do is to check up whether all the data is migrated correctly. The issue may occur with the categories and tags because of the different CMS categorizing system. Thus, you should diligently look through all the website content hierarchy and check up all the relations between the posts and their categories.
2. Take Care About SEO
As far as during the migration aisite makes URLs SEO friendly – by forming the internal links in accordance to the rewrite rules of the new CMS platform, you should proceed with the following steps:
-
Make Website Crawlable
It means that your website coding ground should be readable for Google bots. You should avoid Adobe Flash and JavaScripts, they are not Google darlings.
-
Set up Permanent 301 Redirect
301 permanent URLs redirect from your old website to the new one will help you to save your traffic and ranking. This option informs Google bot about the new location of your website and all your site visitors will be referred directly to the new page.In case you are migrating your website to Drupal or WordPress, notice that aisite allows to set up 301 URLs redirect automatedly.
-
Be Careful with Robots.txt
Make sure that your robots.txt file is working properly. Robots.txt file is the file you put to your website root directory and in such way you inform Google bot what page it can and can’t visit. In case, after the migration you are still developing your website on a live test server, make sure you are using robots.txt. And when you will have done away with all the preparatory actions on your new website, just apply robots.txt to the directories you don’t want to be crawlable.
-
Create a Sitemap
Also, you have to create the sitemap of your new website. This is one more method to make your website perfectly crawlable. The sitemap gives a sign to search engines to index your website from the very beginning till the end. Usually, the sitemap is generated with the help of plugin or extension you should install to your site.
3. New Look – New Design
After changing your CMS platform, one thing you should take urgent measures on is your website design.It’s not recommended to migrate the template from one CMS to another, because of the various templating systems (and it’s no easy task, either). Also, if you are going to start redesigning from scratch, you’ll be able to create the responsive design and amaze your site visitors with the new, improved look of your web project. Moreover, there are a great bulk of already created themes including free of cost and premium ones.
So, these are the basic post-migration procedures to make your site conversion straightforward and beneficial.
P.S. Haven’t done the website migration yet? Set up your free Demo and see how rapidly and accurately aisite will conduct your site switch to your desired CMS platform. Make sure – the migration won’t take you more than a few minutes and no efforts at all.
