SEO Site Migration Case Study

Typically, a website migration has a negative short-term effect on SEO but positive long-term benefits, providing any changes made, such as to keyword targeting, website performance, user experience, mobile usability, security, navigation, etc., are for the better.

In nearly every case, it takes time for Search Engines to understand any changes made to your site, particularly if you have a large site or one that is not regularly updated or changed. This will typically negatively impact your search performance and visibility, though the impact length will vary depending on the case.

More seriously, where URL or content changes are made, but redirects are not set up (which redirects the old URL to the new one), this can cause a serious loss of traffic. The impact of this is heightened if other websites link to those URLs, which would result in an Authority and Trust drop for the site.

We wrote a forty-point Website Migration SEO Checklist on the subject; such is its importance. If any of these items, plus a few more, are not properly handled, it can have a major and, in some cases, catastrophic effect on your SEO.

Our ecommerce client was becoming increasingly concerned about the user experience of its Magento website and wanted to upgrade to a faster and more flexible platform to provide a better user experience for its customers, together with improving the back-office processes and order handling. Just over three years ago, after extensive research and testing of alternative ecommerce platforms, the decision was made to switch to the Shopware platform.

The site build was originally scheduled to take twelve months, however, challenges with the systems integration and the process of importing data, delayed the planned launch date until January 2024. Although the site was handed over early in 2024, amends to the site, population of additional data, staff training and changes to the processing and order handling meant that the launch date was eventually moved back to Wednesday, 2^nd October, to make sure that the site up to the exacting standards of the site's owners for its users and customers.

Our well-established and very knowledgeable ecommerce clients, are well-versed in migrations, having experienced two major site moves in their eighteen years online, and are well aware of the risks, having suffered a massive loss of visibility and traffic in their first one. The second migration, handled by Zelst, went well and so our client understood the importance of our work and were keen to involve Zelst early in the planning process.

Because our client felt that by improving the user experience and introducing better functionality, it would be easier to buy products, and the conversion rate would improve, so their key objective was to retain rankings, visibility and traffic, and grow through improving conversions.

Our client also wanted to simplify the navigation and remove certain product ranges and areas of the website, which they recognised might impact visibility and traffic.

Any good migration is based on a solid plan, in which we cover all the forty points in our SEO Migration checklist plus a few more. We ensured all of these areas were covered and double checked, but some of the big issues in the migration included the following:-

Because we (and the developers) and no previous experience of the Shopware platform, we spent a lot of time researching the platform, understanding how best to optimise it, the challenges we face, and understanding what functionality and or modules were available and what would need to be developed bespoke.

We then started to develop the new site structure, based upon the new target areas and those areas that would no longer be targeted, and agreed this with the client.

We then started to work on the menu, which also required a lot of consultation and bargaining/compromise!

Once the initial designs were approved, we then had further consultation and bargaining/compromise with the designer, to ensure that the new page designs would work well for SEO as well as User Experience.

This then resulted in us needing to make changes to the product and category content to accommodate the changed layout, and also create a number of additional pages.

We were then able to make an inventory of all of the current pages, linked-to pages, and any 404s that had not yet been redirected, and mapped all of these manually to the new pages on the site.

In addition, we had to audit and amend the existing redirect file, and make changes to the destination URLs based on the new site URLs.

Although all of the content was carefully migrated from the old platform to the new, we didn’t leave anything to chance, and in the eight weeks leading up to launch, we regularly crawled, checked, audited and optimised all of the pages on the site.

Despite one or two issues on day one, including the hosting admin not migrating the non-www to www redirect, visibility only fell marginally following the migration, and traffic only fell on the day of the move.

Search visibility increased steadily, and by January, had increased by over 50%.

Sales were well up in October, November and December, and conversion rates have improved, particularly from organic search traffic.

The site can now build on this excellent start to maximise opportunities over the coming year and onwards.