Preparing for your site migration: Marketer's Guide

When migrating your site to a new CMS platform, as a marketer, there are a few things you need to take ownership of for your site migration. All items listed have one main thing in common: planning. Your site migration will be a major headache if you do not put the proper strategy and organization in place before you start.

Content

Content is the meat and potatoes of your site. Without it, your site would provide little value to anyone. Yes, your site has more than content, but content is arguably the most important aspect of your site.

You need to review your current content, decide what you’ll be migrating and what you’ll be deleting. This will help insure you don’t end up with duplicate content and loads of rework later.

Links

Links are one of the top SEO indicators for your site, which is why it’s so important to make sure they migrate correctly. This includes inbound links as well, so be sure to have proper URLs and 301 redirects established in your migration.

SEO

This goes-hand-and-hand with the top two items. There are definitely more things to consider when it comes to site migration and SEO than content and links – SEOMoz has a great website migration guide for SEOs on their site that gives a detailed overview of what you need to be aware of with your site migration when it comes to SEO.

Analytics

It’s important to track your site before, during and after your migration to monitor pages that didn’t migrate correctly or help you discover issues that may occurred during the migration that you were unaware of.

A CMS migration is not a small task and takes careful consideration and planning. As a marketer, it’s important to be aware of what goes on in the migration process and what aspects of your site you need to take ownership of during the migration.

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Website Migration Resources:

• SEO site migration guide

• Best practices when moving your site