What Is SEO and Why Is It Important?

Search engine optimization is the strategic practice of optimizing a website to enhance its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). The primary goal of SEO is to improve the website’s organic (non-paid) traffic by making it more relevant and attractive to search engines like Google. This involves various techniques such as optimizing content, utilizing relevant keywords, improving website structure, and enhancing user experience.

The importance of SEO to your website cannot be overstated. In a vast digital landscape where millions of websites compete for attention, SEO is the beacon that guides search engines to recognize and prioritize your content. When your website appears higher in search results, it is more likely to attract organic traffic, increasing visibility, credibility, and potential conversions.

Essentially, SEO is the cornerstone of online success, offering a roadmap for your website to navigate the complex algorithms of search engines and connect with your target audience effectively. It is a fundamental tool that ensures your digital presence is not just a website but a discoverable and influential entity in the vast online ecosystem.

Safeguard Your SEO Efforts or Be Doomed

Safeguarding SEO efforts during the migration to WordPress is paramount due to the potential impact on a website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results. There is a risk of disruption when transitioning to a new platform like WordPress. Here are some common concerns website owners have and issues to watch out for:

• Loss of traffic: Improper redirects, broken links, and URL changes can confuse search engines and users. This can lead to a drop in traffic and visibility.
• Damage to search rankings: Poorly executed migration can negatively impact your search engine ranking, requiring time and effort to recover.
• Duplicate content: Migration processes can sometimes create duplicate content, which is penalized by search engines.
• Website structure: Changes in your website structure and content can affect your keyword rankings and your position in the search engines.
• Broken features and functionality: Not everything might migrate smoothly, leading to broken features, forms, or payment gateways.
• Mobile responsiveness issues: Ensure the new site is optimized for all devices, as mobile usage is increasingly dominant.
• Inconsistent design and user experience: Maintaining a consistent look and feel across the new site is crucial for user trust and navigation.
• Downtime and inaccessibility: Migration can temporarily take your site offline, impacting user experience and potential sales.
• Data loss and security vulnerabilities: Data loss during migration can be disastrous. Ensure proper backups and security measures are in place.
• Performance issues: The new platform or hosting might not handle traffic like the old one, leading to slow loading times.
• Communication and stakeholder management: Keeping everyone informed and involved throughout the process is crucial to avoid surprises and disruptions.
• Unexpected challenges: Unexpected issues can inevitably arise, so flexibility and adaptability are key.

But There’s Hope

By understanding these common concerns and taking proactive steps, website owners can significantly increase their chances of a smooth and successful website migration. Failing to address these intricacies can result in a loss of link authority, diminished keyword relevance, and a decline in organic traffic.

WordPress, as a robust content management system, offers numerous advantages for website management. However, a seamless migration is crucial to preserve and enhance SEO rankings. The transition may introduce broken links and missing pages without careful consideration and strategic implementation. Additionally, inconsistencies could negatively affect the website’s performance in search engine algorithms.

By prioritizing safeguarding SEO efforts during migration, businesses ensure a smooth transition, maintaining their hard-earned search engine visibility and safeguarding the integrity of their online presence. This proactive approach not only protects against potential setbacks but also sets the stage for continued SEO success in the evolving digital landscape.

Keep reading to understand how our WordPress agency successfully protects your SEO during a WordPress migration.

Seamless Redirection Strategy

Setting up permanent 301 redirects in migration is crucial, especially for SEO. Imagine your website as a bustling city with intricate streets and alleys. When it undergoes a revamp, ensuring a smooth transition for both users and search engines becomes paramount. WebDevStudios employs a Seamless Redirection Strategy, using 301 redirects to guide visitors from older URLs to new ones. This maintains your website’s link authority and safeguards its rankings in the digital landscape.

Conserved Content Integrity

As the digital migration journey unfolds, WebDevStudios meticulously upholds the content integrity of your website. Content, URL structures, and internal linking are carefully conserved, ensuring that vital keywords and metadata retain their prominence. This meticulous preservation is not just a process; it’s a commitment to maintaining the SEO integrity that defines your online identity.

Enhanced Sitemap Submission

Search engines act as explorers in the vast terrain of the internet, seeking out new content to index. Crawlers understand your sitemap’s relationships. It helps bots index your pages better. As such, it is essential for SEO purposes that Google has an updated version of your new domain. WebDevStudios understands the importance of aiding this discovery process. Through the creation and submission of an updated XML sitemap, the experts ensure that search engines efficiently find and index the new pages on your revamped website.

Vigilant Error Monitoring

Even the most well-executed plans can encounter unexpected hiccups. WebDevStudios remains vigilant post-migration, monitoring for broken links, missing pages, and any anomalies that could adversely impact your SEO. This proactive approach ensures swift resolution, preventing potential pitfalls in the journey to maintaining and enhancing your website’s SEO standing.

Rigorous Testing Protocols

A meticulous eye for detail is the hallmark of WebDevStudios’ approach. Comprehensive testing procedures are in place to verify the correct implementation and functionality of essential SEO elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, and structured data. This commitment to quality ensures that every facet of your website aligns with SEO best practices.

Critical Crawl and Index Checks

WebDevStudios recognizes the importance of checkpoints in the SEO journey. Verifying search engine crawl and indexation of the new website pages is critical. Supported by tools like Google Search Console, this ongoing monitoring process keeps a finger on the pulse of your website’s progress in the digital realm.

Backlinks

Next, we recommend that you contact your content partners about updating old links to the new domain. This includes links from guest posts, partnerships, and directories. Doing this will ensure that the valuable backlinks you have acquired over time point to the correct pages on your website.

Transparent Timeline Management

How long should an SEO migration take? It depends on how big your website is, how much content you’re moving, and how many audits you need to do pre- and post-migration. In general, a 100-page website will take a lot less time than a 1,000-page website, which will take a lot less time than a 50,000-page website. It’s key to give yourself enough time to plan, develop a staging site, QA and audit, and then implement. At WebDevStudios, we encourage transparency and open communication about the timeline of your project so everyone is on the same page and has the same expectations.

Performance Boost and Speed Optimization

In the fast-paced world of the internet, speed is of the essence. WebDevStudios goes beyond the surface to enhance website performance on the new platform. By optimizing speed, the user experience is elevated, indirectly contributing to improved SEO rankings. Our experts leverage tools like Core Web Vitals to ensure this task is executed precisely.

More Than a Migration

A content migration isn’t just a content migration. It’s more than that, and our WordPress agency knows this. A content migration should be viewed as an opportunity for improvements and optimization, such as:

• Format and accessibility overhaul: Content can be migrated into more accessible formats and optimized for different devices. Also, the content can be restructured for improved clarity and user experience.
• Taxonomy and metadata upgrade: A migration can be an opportunity to create a more robust and efficient taxonomy and enrich content with meaningful metadata for better discoverability and organization.
• Workflow and collaboration improvements: A migration can be used to streamline content workflows. This is also a chance to integrate workflows with other systems. In the end, this could improve collaboration between content creators and editors.
• Compliance and security enhancement: New systems can offer tighter control over access, permissions, and content management. This improves security and compliance.
• Data-driven insights and optimization: New platforms can provide richer data analytics for understanding user behavior and optimizing content performance for continuous improvement.

Contact WebDevStudios to Safeguard Your SEO Efforts

In the intricate dance of website migration and SEO maintenance, WebDevStudios emerges as the guiding partner. Our team ensures that every step taken in your website content migration leads to an enhanced online presence. From seamless redirections and content integrity to vigilant monitoring and performance optimization, our commitment to safeguarding your SEO rankings is unwavering.

Trust WebDevStudios to navigate the complexities and elevate your website’s visibility in the digital landscape. Contact us to talk about your upcoming WordPress migration. We’ll use our expertise to protect your SEO during your WordPress migration.

The post How WebDevStudios Safeguards Your SEO Efforts During a WordPress Migration appeared first on WebDevStudios.

This type of migration is applicable when you are adding new features to your subsite and want to migrate only the content. For example, moving classic editor content to the block editor or sending data to a headless content management system (CMS).

Let’s take a look at how you can export and import content by adding your own WP CLI commands. Define the goals and objectives to be achieved with the migration.

Here are some examples of goals

• Retain the post IDs
• Retain the taxonomies
• Rename certain post meta fields
• Add new post meta fields
• Rename some old custom post types to new ones
• Replace site domain or URLs

Sometimes the clients may have unrealistic expectations about how to migrate subsite content to a multisite network. There are also times when requirements cannot be fulfilled technically.

So, it is important to discuss the requirements and the possible solutions with the engineering team and the clients. Submit the proposal on what could be done and how long it will take and get approval from the client. Then, start working on the solution.

Leverage the WP CLI

WP CLI makes it easy to export and import data of any size. Extend the WP CLI class and create your own commands.

Here is an overview of the whole migration process.

Replicate the live environment locally to write and test the CLI commands. Add separate commands for export and import.

Make sure the site URL is passed every time you run the commands to avoid running commands on the default blog.

wp migrate import –url=http://mywebsite.com/blog2

Add a command to rerun export or import content by passing an array of post IDs, terms, or meta. This allows you to fix the errors during migration without running the whole process.

View the code on Gist.

Pro tip: Use the progress bar utility to display the status of the export and import process.

Prerequisites

Migration requires a lot of planning and preparation. Discuss with the client and discover the data that needs to be migrated.

Content Freeze

There should be a content freeze for keeping the data intact. Whether it is backend content entry or the frontend contact forms, user registration, etc, to be stopped during the migration. Make the site read-only.

Exporting Content

You can export data as SQL, XML, or JSON files. This example exports content as JSON files in batches. This way you don’t have to worry about MySQL timeout and you can include any data you want to export.

Include terms, metadata, and any associated data to each post item. Store the exported files in their respective folders inside the main migration folder.

The path could be something like /migration/{post-type}/1.json, where the post type refers to post type slug, and numeric 1 refers to the first batch of the exported content.

Data Mapping

Map the corresponding post meta fields of each post type carefully. In some cases, you may want to rename the meta keys.

The best advice here is to keep the old meta keys and add new ones. This way you can review the new keys and values after migration.

For example, if you want to rename customer_ip_address to customer_ip, keep old ones and add new ones.

Importing Content

Take a full backup of the site including files and database before running your migration commands on production. Get the exported data, do the mapping, validate it and then proceed with the import.

Import each type of data separately, like terms, post types, post meta and menus, and so on. Whether you are overwriting data or creating new records, add a log to keep track of the status. Test the commands on the local environment and make sure they work without errors.

Logs

Catch the errors during the migration process and log them. Log error messages to a separate file, this helps to isolate and check the migration-related errors.

Add preview links to the migration summary on the terminal, this helps you to quickly navigate different content types and check the content.

Pro tip: A table of results can be helpful to view the total number of migrated items.

Migration Runbook

List out the action items for each team with instructions and commands in hierarchical order. Discuss the process with the engineering team, DevOps, and content team. This allows everyone to be on the same page.

Divide the runbook into pre-migration, migration, and post-migration. Then, add the respective steps.

Pro tip: Do a dry run on a staging environment that mimics the production environment; this helps you to find any errors and tweak the migration script.

Run migration

Prepare the production environment for the migration process. Follow the runbook that you created, then test the output.

Testing

Review the imported content, and look for any missing or incorrect data. Check if all the items are imported to their corresponding taxonomy terms.

You could find more clues in the migration logs. If there are any errors and warnings, follow that trail and confirm that data has been imported.

Rerun the commands if needed and repeat the testing process. Once you feel confident that the content migrated correctly, do the clean-up, like removing any temporary database tables, files, etc.

Finish the items on the post-migration checklist and launch the site.

Conclusion

Each site is different, which means the process to migrate subsite content to multisite could be different as well. We hope that this article sheds some light on the migration process to make it easier.

What are the challenges that you encountered during the migration and how did you overcome them? Let us know in the comments below.

Looking for help? Let WebDevStudios handle the migration, contact us now!

Further reading: WP CLI commands cookbook .

The post How to Migrate Subsite Content to a Multisite Network appeared first on WebDevStudios.

This post is born out of a year of challenges, growth, and my new found love and respect for the beast known as WordPress Migrations. Its purpose is to help those who may be entering this space for the first time or needing to refine their processes become more efficient (and make some more money) doing migrations.

This is not an exhaustive list, but here are ten things that I learned migrating websites to WordPress:

1. Create a Migration Questionnaire

When you accept the challenge of migrating a website, you automatically become the authority of content you don’t own and/or didn’t write, but your client will look to you to ensure that they’re not forgetting or missing anything in the process. On the surface, it may seem unfair, but consider that in most migrations, your client is coming from one of those “other guys” to WordPress for the first time. This means you are the authority and must be proactive in leading the troops. The best way is kicking off your migrations with a questionnaire.

Here are a few questions to get you started:

1. Will authors be imported?
2. Will comments be imported?
3. If so, should comments be hidden or displayed?
4. Is there any data that should not be imported?

This is your moment to shine. Take the lead and show your client why they hired you to move their content!

2. Create a Data Mapping Document

If you’re like me, you don’t like taking trips and getting lost, and if you do, you want to at least have a good cell phone signal for your GPS to work. After you’ve had your client complete the questionnaire, you’ll need a map for the data you’re migrating.

Some things to consider in creating your data mapping document:

1. If any of the content relates to custom post types, what content will go where?
2. What tables in the source data contain users?

Keep in mind that your client should sign off on this document before you begin writing and scripts. This is your road map for not getting lost, and you’ll want an agreement for all parties involved, for clarity’s (and sanity’s) sake.

3. Request an OFFICIAL sitemap

Forty-eight out of fifty states require some form of car insurance or financial waiver in case of an accident. Just like driving ninety miles per hour on the highway, when you’re moving hundreds if not thousands of posts and pages, the risk of losing something along the way is high.

In day to day life, you never plan on being in an accident, but sometimes it just happens, and you want to be covered when it does. Even with a data mapping document and questionnaire, it’s almost inevitable that somebody’s going to bring up a secret section of their website that should have been brought over.

A sitemap is the insurance you need for your migration. Yeah, you may be able to migrate content without it, but it’s just not smart to do. Like car insurance, not only does it protect you, but it also protects the client. By requesting this upfront, you bring both parties to a consensus of what’s coming over and what’s not. Don’t migrate without it!

4. Use a staging server

If you’re not already using a staging server for your projects, this is a good time to start. For those of you that don’t know: Your staging server is a publicly accessible server that allows you to test or revise web pages before they’re made live.

In the world of migrations, your staging server is where you should run your migrations. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Your local machine is too slow (period)
2. If your migration contains media, you have to now FTP all of that data to your server
3. Production is never the place to make edits (before you go live)
4. Staging allows the content team to get familiar with WordPress before launch
5. You need a place to QA your migration with the client

5. Decide when to “freeze” the content

So the day has arrived and you’re ready to launch, so you visit the current site and your staging environment to compare and notice fifty new posts since your last import. It’s now two hours before launch and you have to migrate those posts, their images, sync your CDN, and take another snapshot. Whew!

All of this could have been avoided if you had of communicated a date for the client to stop creating new content. In your questionnaire or audit, make sure you discuss this and confirm that all parties are in agreement.

TIP: Allow the content team early access to the staging server so they can create new content there before launch.

6. Don’t forget the media

If you’ve limited the definition of media to images, then you’ve already made a huge mistake.

You left the PDFs, docs, spreadsheets, audio, video clips, etc., in some folder that’s going to be lost when your redirects start. As you already know, websites are made of more than text. Sometimes there are videos on YouTube, Vimeo, or sometimes they’re even self-hosted. If the site is older and no online forms were in place, there may be docs and PDFs scattered throughout. Your audit should account for all media types that need to be imported.

7. Say “Goodbye” to “Hello World”

A simple but often overlooked task in migrations is removing the default data in WordPress. Before you begin your migrations, it’s good practice to delete the “Hello World” post, first comment, and “Sample Page.” While it’s not mandatory, it keeps your migrations fresh and is one less task to remember before launch. Here’s a quick snippet to help you out:

function wds_goodbye_hello_world( $blog_id = 1 ) {

    if ( is_multisite() ) {
        switch_to_blog( $blog_id );
    }

    // Remove the Hello World post AND comment
    wp_delete_post( 1, true );
    wp_delete_post( 2, true );
    wp_delete_comment( 1, true );

    if ( is_multisite() ) {
        restore_current_blog();
    }

}

8. Store original URLs for redirect

This could be the most important thing to remember.

Imagine that you’ve migrated 5,000 posts for a Fortune 100 company, and you realize that you forgot to store the original URLs.

In case you don’t realize why that’s a bad thing: Consider that when the old URLs are forwarded to your new server, those old fashioned URLs with their extensions will 404. Now that Google has dinged you, and your site is no longer listed as first, you panic only to realize that life would have been better if you had just stored the originals. See, you could have forwarded them to the new pretty permalink and maintained your status on Google. Yes, it’s that serious!

If you’re still not convinced, imagine what you’ll say when your client calls you because a popular bookmark within the company (yes, people still use bookmarks) is gone, and they’re panicking because the secretary (who still uses fax machines and paper memos) can’t find her bookmark to the FAQs to answer questions when people call.

In short, it’s all about communication. You want to guarantee that everyone who’s looking for you today can find you tomorrow. So make sure that you store those URLs, and while you’re at it, save some post ids and other meta just in case.

9. Create a redirection script for WordPress

Remember, your migration is not complete when all of the content is imported, but when all of the old traffic routes to the new site properly. Since we’ve discussed the reason for storing original URLs, you need to create a simple redirection script that will actually process your old traffic. There are a few redirection plugins in the WordPress repo, but here’a sample one we use internally (you’ll need to add your own error checking):

function wds_redirect_old_traffic() {

     if ( ! is_404() && ! isset( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ) ) {
          return;
     }

     global $wp;

     $request = $wp->request;

     $post_id = wds_get_post_id_from_external_url( $request );

     if ( $post_id ) {
          wp_redirect( get_permalink( $post_id ) , 301 );
          exit;
     }

     if ( is_multisite() ) {
          restore_current_blog();
     }

}

add_action( 'template_redirect', 'wds_redirect_old_traffic', 1 );


function wds_get_post_id_from_external_url( $url, $blog_id = 1 ){
    
     global $wp_query;
     
     if ( is_multisite() ) {
          switch_to_blog( $blog_id );
     }

     $args = array(
          'post_type'      => 'post',
          'posts_per_page' => 1,
          'post_status' => 'publish',
          'meta_query' => array(
               array(
                    'key' => '_orig_url',
                    'value' => $url,
                    'compare' => 'LIKE'
               )
          )
     );

     $query = new WP_Query( $args );

     if ( $query->posts ) {
          return $query->posts[0]->ID;
     }

     return false;
    
}

10. Update internal links

Before I close, I’d like to leave you with one more suggestion. When you’ve completed a migration and the site is launched, there’s this joy and sense of relief that washes over you. You realize that you’ve been holding your breath for a few months and can now relax…until you realize you forgot to do some post-launch cleanup.

One of those important tasks is updating each internal link to point to the new host and permalink. Even though we’ve covered storing original URLs and how they can help solve all of our redirection issues, we can make the site faster and more efficient by not having internal links point to the old site.

Fin!

Let me say thank you for making it through my first post for WDS! If you read this whole thing, then you now understand how important migrations are and how doing some simple tasks you can become a migrations master. If you’re still not a believer, then revisit this after you’ve migrated your first major site!

I’d also like to hear from you. What are some things you’ve learned with migrations? Or would like to learn or do you want more explanation on something I touched on in this post?

The post 10 Things I Learned Migrating Websites to WordPress appeared first on WebDevStudios.