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Moving to a New CMS: How to Avoid Losing Traffic and Site Rankings When Switching

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About the project

SunRise, a school that teaches foreign languages to children and adults and also trains teachers, already had its own website when they contacted us.

sr.kharkov.ua was a website that, at the time of the move, had been in the works for about 10 years, ranked in the top 10 for priority queries, enjoyed a high level of trust from search engines, and boasted an impressive link base.

However, the need arose to completely redesign the website: not just update the outdated design, but also change the website's CMS for greater management flexibility. Our task was to support the website migration to ensure the previously achieved results were not lost.

The more URLs are indexed or bookmarked by users, and the more trusted resources link to these URLs, the more search engines trust the site (and therefore, the higher its search ranking). Migrating a website to a new template, design, or CMS always involves changing the code, and often the URL. The main goal of the migration is to maintain these links. Otherwise, the search engine, unable to find the page at the old address and lacking information about the location of the new page, will simply discard it from the index. This means that users simply won't find the site and will switch to a competitor.

Subject:
Region:

Ukraine

Period:

23.07.20 — 23.08.20

Main tasks:

- Transferring the site to a new CMS;
- Saving traffic;
- Maintaining website positions;
- Increase website traffic by improving website rankings.

Results for 1 month:
  • Successful website migration to CMS Wordpress
  • At the same level maintaining positions
  • For priority requests traffic growth
Project Features:

1. The new site had a completely different URL structure (new categories and subcategories that allowed visitors to find what they needed on the site more quickly).
2. We decided to change the URLs and make them human-readable. Furthermore, the old site didn't have the secure https protocol. We downloaded all the old site's URLs, compared them with the new site's URLs, and set up 301 redirects.

Starting point

To begin with, we recorded the initial data so that we could later compare it with the results of the move.

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Stage 1 - Preparation

Pages of the new and old sites have been uploaded:

  • Priority pages (landing pages for services; information pages that generate traffic) have been identified and a redirect table has been compiled
  • Backups of the old site's pages have been saved
  • Meta tags have been transferred from the old site to the new one.
  • The texts from the landing pages of the old site have been transferred to the new one.

Tools used:

  • Screaming Frog
  • Google Spreadsheet
  • Google Analytics
Stage 2 - Moving
  1. Defining a rule in an htaccess document for a 301 redirect. Depending on the CMS and server settings, 301 redirects may need to be configured using different rules. In this case, the following rule worked: Redirect 301 /old-page https://newsite.com.ua/newpage
  2. We performed a full scan of old URLs and checked the server response code.
Stage 3 - Control of the move

Rank screening, comparison of site rankings before and after the move, and verification of site consolidation in search results. The client identified priority queries, and their rankings were monitored more closely.

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Features: During the website's development, language versions were created: Russian, English, and Ukrainian, but the content on the Ukrainian and English versions was not translated. Therefore, the unfinished language versions of the website were closed from indexing until the translation was completed.

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Stage 4 - Internal and external website optimization

These works were carried out in parallel with the 3rd stage of works.

 

The following was completed:

  • a technical analysis of the site was carried out
  • Technical specifications for developers and content managers to correct errors were created
  • an analysis of competitors in this area was conducted
  • An external promotion plan and anchor list have been created
  • posts with anchorless links were posted on forums
  • donors for permanent links have been selected
  • Technical specifications for copywriters to write articles have been created
  • An analysis of the relevance of new site pages to queries was conducted
  • empty pages filled with content

Below are the data on the visibility of the site in search engines and the data on the number of keywords after the move.

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Conclusion

The completed work resulted in a successful website migration to a new CMS. Rankings remained the same and even increased for priority queries, leading to an increase in targeted website traffic.

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    Daria Babyanskaya,
    manager of the Imaris company
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