Site Migration Best Practices: Your Burning Questions, Answered

Site migration is when you make major changes to your website’s structure, domain, hosting, or platform. 

Think of it like renovating your house, except instead of just knocking down walls, you’re also moving your address, rethinking your landscaping (hello, SEO!), and maybe installing a whole new security system. 

Why do it? Because staying stagnant in the digital marketing world is a one-way ticket to irrelevance. Whether you’re rebranding, consolidating multiple sites, or upgrading your tech stack, site migration can transform your business — but only if it’s done right. 

But here’s the kicker: Site migration is risky. Search rankings can tank, traffic can nosedive, and leads can disappear faster than free snacks in the office breakroom. That’s why we’re here: to help you avoid a digital disaster. 

The first step of a website migration is to ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” 

For Intero Digital, our goal was crystal-clear: After our acquisitions, we had six legacy brands with separate websites. Consolidating them into one wasn’t just about cutting down on hosting fees (though, let’s be real, that was a nice perk). It was about creating a unified brand presence, streamlining marketing efforts, and better capturing leads. 

Pro tip: Write down your site migration goals, and make sure every single action and decision aligns with them. Are you trying to boost SEO? Improve the user experience? Simplify backend management? Knowing your “why” and documenting your goals will keep your team laser-focused as you work your way through your website migration checklist.

One of the most critical website migration steps is conducting a thorough website audit. Content, URLs, backlinks, metadata, analytics data, site speed, mobile performance, design assets, technical infrastructure — the whole enchilada. 

At Intero Digital, we kicked things off with a massive content audit across the six legacy sites. Picture us in a digital war room, armed with spreadsheets and caffeine, figuring out what content to keep, merge, rewrite, or toss. 

Here’s what we analyzed: 

• High-performing pages: What content was driving traffic and leads? Top priority for migration. 

• Outdated content: Anything irrelevant or underperforming got rewritten or cut. 

• Duplicate content: Because Google hates duplicate content, and we weren’t about to risk our rankings by migrating multiple pieces from multiple sites that covered the same information. 

Pro tip: Use tools like Screaming Frog or Semrush to crawl your site and gather data on URLs, metadata, and backlinks before making any moves. We also have a content audit template that can help you get started.

Here are a few ways you can keep your SEO strategy strong during your website migration: 

• 301 redirects: A 301 redirect tells Google that an old URL has permanently moved to a new one. During our migration, we built a detailed redirect map so that every single page from our legacy sites had a proper new home on InteroDigital.com. 

• Preserved backlinks: Use a tool like Ahrefs to track inbound links and make sure they point to the right new pages. Losing backlinks = losing authority = bad news. 

• Keyword mapping: Ensure your new pages are optimized for the right keywords. 

Pro tip: Test your redirects before launch. There’s nothing worse than finding out post-migration that your site has broken links and half your pages are leading to a dreaded “404 Not Found” error. 

Run usability tests. 

A shiny new website isn’t worth much if it’s frustrating to navigate. That’s why, for InteroDigital.com, we prioritized a seamless UX so visitors could easily find what they were looking for, whether that was SEO services, content marketing services, or a helpful blog post like this one. 

Before launch, we ran usability tests to identify and fix pain points in our new site’s structure. 

Pro tip: Use heatmaps and A/B tests before your site migration to see how users interact with your current site(s). Tools like Hotjar can reveal valuable user behavior insights. 

Short answer? A LOT. 

Launch day is not the time to find out that your site looks like garbage on mobile or that your contact forms are completely broken. 

At Intero Digital, we tested our new site across multiple devices and browsers, we tested every single link, and we still regularly review site speed and performance. 

Tools we used: 

• Google PageSpeed Insights 

• GTmetrix 

• Good old-fashioned manual testing 

The work doesn’t stop after launch. For weeks, you’ll need to monitor traffic, rankings, and leads like a hawk. You should also use a tool like Google Search Console to check for crawl errors or indexing issues. 

Don’t panic if you see a slight dip in traffic. That’s normal at first! The key is to identify and fix any issues promptly so you can rebound quickly.

If you’re about to tackle a site migration, remember this: Preparation is everything. Follow the tips in this website migration guide, keep your site migration goals in focus, and you’ll come out on the other side stronger than ever.