Tag: domain migration

Categories
Digital Marketing

How To Migrate WordPress Site to New Host

Web hosting is a critical service with a huge market, with variable offerings designed to provide a flexible selection to potential customers. However, as with most things, the general rule is that you get what you pay for.

Some hosting companies offer a wider selection of perks and a greater level of service for the appropriate price. But for a website just getting off its feet and acquiring early traffic, springing for the best package available can seem like something of a waste, especially if your digital budget is limited.

But like a kid going through puberty, there may come a time when your website begins to outgrow its hosting. The growing influx of traffic, increasing demands on the hosting’s ability to load pages, and massive library of content can strain an average hosting service. At some point, you might need to upgrade and migrate your website.

Migrating a website is easier said than done. Depending on how your website is structured, you have a few different ways to go about it. If you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, your options are even greater.

When Is It Time to Migrate?

There are two general circumstances under which you should consider switching your hosting provider:

  1. You’re outgrowing your current hosting, and you want a better offer.
  2. Your hosting provider’s quality of service isn’t quite what it used to be, and it is beginning to affect your business.

While migrating a website can be complicated at first glance, it’s much simpler than it used to be, and you don’t have to be a professional webmaster to get it done. Here’s how even a novice blogger with a successful and growing WordPress site can migrate to a better, more suitable web hosting.

How Do You Migrate a WordPress Website?

This basic guide will be assuming that you can’t get your new host to do it for you. If you haven’t checked, go visit your new chosen hosting provider to see if they offer their own proprietary tool and tutorial for transferring a WordPress site onto their service. Most of the time, this consists of filling out a few crucial details, submitting them, installing a plugin, following their instructions, and then waiting.

Aside from getting your hosting provider to do the migration for you, there are two ways of migrating a website through a CMS like WordPress.

You can go the automated route of using a WordPress-specific migration tool or plugin, or you can go the old-school or manual route, the same as migrating any other website, CMS or no.

Going the manual route will require an in-depth tutorial, especially if you’re a beginner to File Transfer Protocol (FTP), SQL databases, and WordPress config files.

We will not be covering the manual process today, but there are plenty of guides out there on various FTP clients, MySQL administration tools, and config file editing.

Utilizing a WordPress Migration Plugin

If you do not have a hosting-specific migration tool and step-by-step tutorial, you can still take advantage of the power of WordPress plugins to simplify most of the process.

There are other hosting migration tools such as the All-In-One WP Migration plugin, which tops the results for migration plugins at over 4 million active installations. Alternatives include the WPvivid migration tool and the Jetpack all-encompassing WordPress plugin, which also provides security features, malware scans, spam blocking, and more.

If you want even better plugins, you can pay a premium price for more feature-complete migration tools.

The individual steps you will need to take to migrate your website with any one of these tools can differ from tool to tool.

For the most part, however, your journey will always start in your Dashboard, or the backend of your WordPress site.

Start by logging into your Dashboard, navigating to the Plugins menu, and installing your plugin of choice via install new. Activate your chosen plugin.

If you’re migrating to a new hosting and a new domain, you will need to go into your WordPress dashboard in the new site and install the same plugin.

From there, make sure that your plugins match between both the old and new site, and make sure every plugin (AND your WordPress installation itself) is up-to-date.

You can use a temporary domain to setup and test your new WordPress installation. Domain names are addresses used to point people on the Internet to different web servers – a temporary domain allows you to make sure that everything is in working order before you point your existing domain to your new hosting provider.

Use any temporary domain and make sure your website isn’t indexed by search engines by going into the Settings tab, then the Reading tab, and checking the Discourage search engines from indexing this site box. Remember to uncheck this once everything is done.

From there, you can use the plugin’s backup and migration options on the old site to transfer your content over to the new site.

It’s critical that you do a backup first.

WordPress as a CMS is a skeleton on which the meat of your site is installed – what you’re doing is zipping that meat up into an uploaded file, downloading that file, and exporting it to your new page via the same plugin.

Next, it’s time to double-check that everything went as planned. Check your posts, your images, your archives, your pages. Refresh your new site and go over it in detail.

If you are transferring to a new domain permanently, a major point of difficulty is that all your old content, CSS styling, and pages will still be referencing your old domain.

If you aren’t transferring your domain over, but are opting for a completely new domain, you will have to address this – thankfully, there are multiple advanced Find-And-Replace WordPress plugins that allow you to automatically replace all instances of your old domain name with your new domain name. It’s a good idea to install one of these plugins anyway to comb through your new installation for potential errors or problems.

Otherwise, the final step will be to point your domain towards your new hosting provider, through the backend of your chosen hosting service. You can do this by logging into your hosting server and looking for a list of nameservers to point towards. Then, you log into your domain registrar, where you bought your domain, and navigate to the option to point towards a new nameserver through your domain management options or domain settings.

It can take time for these changes to go into effect. This is because of worldwide DNS (domain name system) propagation. If domain names point to actual locations in the real world, then the DNS is a worldwide address book. It can take a few hours to update accordingly.

In Summary

Migrating to a new host is a great idea for a number of reasons, including better services, greater resources for your website, being able to handle more traffic, and letting you increase the size of your site.

However, it can be a complicated process, and the more complex your website, the more difficult it becomes. Sometimes, a WordPress site can’t just be migrated safely through plugins. Sometimes, there’s no way around a manual migration.

If you’re not up to the task, consulting a webmaster or asking your web hosting to help can make things a lot easier. You can avoid the headache of a million unseen problems and errors halfway through the process by asking the right people the right questions. And remember – hosting-specific tools and tutorials are usually going to be more helpful than general guides.

Categories
SEO

8 SEO Considerations for a Smooth Transition

Thinking about migrating your domain to a new name? Discover the eight important SEO considerations for a smooth transition. For a smooth transition in SEO, key considerations include maintaining URL structures or implementing proper redirects, preserving and optimizing existing content, and ensuring meta tags are transferred correctly. It’s crucial to conduct thorough keyword research to align with new goals, monitor site performance to catch any SEO issues early, and communicate changes to search engines through updated sitemaps and consistent monitoring of search console data.

If it’s time to give your company a facelift but you don’t feel that re-designing the website itself is enough, rebranding may be the solution. But, with a domain change comes the potential loss of all the SEO you’ve worked hard to build for your current website. If you don’t want to start over from the bottom and risk losing customers and valuable traffic in the process, there are some important things to consider before you begin the rebranding and domain migration process.

Send Signals Before the Switch

If it is possible to do so, use the old website to deliver signals to Google about the transition for a short amount of time before the transition occurs. You can do this through traditional marketing and PR efforts as well as through making changes to your content and metadata. When you’re moving to the new site, maintain elements of the old branding within the new metadata as well.

Use the Same URL Structure

Make every effort to retain the current URL structure. Changes to the URL structure and content placement can wreak havoc on your migration and SEO. Maintaining the URL structure or moving to something similar to the same number of content levels helps mitigate SEO risks and consolidates a variety of signals. It also simplifies the redirect process because it can be done with a single line in the .htaccess file.

All that said, Google will never forget a crawl path. Over time, the old URL will have picked up links that point to non-200 URLs and gone through changes and restructures of its own. Because of this, you still need to compile a complete redirect list and process it to ensure you retain all previous equity and signals.

Keep the Existing Content Wherever Possible

Though it may require some minor edits to align it with the new brand, it’s best to maintain as much of your original content as possible. If you must create new content, aim to replicate your old content as much as you can so that you avoid losing Authority and authorship. This helps prevent your rankings from dropping. Even keeping small elements like your fonts and headers the same can have a big influence on SEO.

Properly Implement 301 Redirects

To maximize your SEO effort and keep visitors happy, redirect every page from your old site to the corresponding pays on your new site.

If you have not been able to maintain the same URL structure for whatever reason, things are a bit more complicated. Because you can’t redirect the old pages to the exact same page on the new site, you have to redirect to the most relevant page on your new site. the easiest way to do this is to create a spreadsheet with the URL for the old site in one column and the URL for the new site and the other. This process could be time-consuming depending on the size of your site so it is crucial to prioritize and start with the pages that generate the most traffic.

Remember People Will Search for the Old Brand

Even if you’ve done a great job with marketing and PR to alert people of the rebrand with a new business name, people are still going to search for your previous brand name for years. To account for this, accommodate for the old brand name through your content in your FAQ Pages, blogs, and support section.

Users, both your existing user base and new ones to come along during and after the rebrand, may have questions about the old platform still. failing to include the old brand in your content to capture those searches leaves traffic to your competitors which could result in a large number of missed opportunities.

Generate New Signals

For the greatest success, you need to take time to generate new signals for the new domain. this can be done with traditional marketing, digital PR, and link building.

When you put together the redirect list, identify high importance links, potentially with branded anchors or commercial anchors that are pointed to the old domain. You can use these as outreach targets to try to have the link updated but these efforts should not substitute adding fresh signals to the mix.

Update Your Social Media Profiles

When your new brand is an effect, it’s crucial to update all of your social media sites. Depending on the platform, it may be a challenge. When rebranding on social media consider:

Twitter has a lot of IDs that aren’t in use so if someone has the one you want but isn’t actively using it, reach out to see if you can take it over. Twitter recommends doing this because they are slow at deactivating these accounts.

Facebook only allows you to change your page name and URL one time. If you need to rebrand a second time, you’ll be stuck creating a new page from scratch and hoping the audience migrates over.

LinkedIn is fairly easy when rebranding as long as someone else isn’t already using your company name. If that’s the case, you may need to change your company name just a little,  such as keeping the name the same and adding a tagline after it. Contact LinkedIn directly to change the URL.

Update Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics

To make sure you are getting accurate data about your traffic and potential crawling issues with Google, update both your Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics accounts to the new domain.

If you follow these recommendations to rebrand and also focus on creating buzz and new signals around the new domain, it should be easy to combine the old brand with a new one and make your transition easier after the migration.

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