Issues in Migrating to CMS
-
My number one client is migrating a formerly HTML/Dreamweaver site to an open source CMS (CMS Made Simple.)
We have execellent rankings right now, and I am concerned about what we will lose, and how to ensure the rankings stay.
Any guidance? I have already asked the developer to maintain the page names and structure, and tag the CMS output pages.htm .
I've run a few weak spiders over the staged CMS site, and all the pages are being picked up.
What else can I do, we are getting ready to launch.
THANKS!
-
You have covered the most important items.
1. If possible, keep the same URL structure. If that is not possible, be certain all the URLs are properly redirected (301) to the equivalent pages on the new site.
2. Ensure the new site's navigation is solid. Perform a crawl of the old and new site, or generate a sitemap for both sites. Compare the URLs and investigate any discrepancies.
3. You should investigate all the normal SEO factors to ensure they are in tact between sites. Header tags, meta descriptions, meta tags such as index and follow, robots.txt, alt tags, etc. should all be inspected.
4. You should check to ensure the new site uses valid HTML/CSS. While not directly SEO related, invalid code often causes issues where your site does not appear properly in various browser versions. Your pages can easily be checked with the W3C validation tool.
5. Minimize flash on the new site or, if you do use flash, ensure you have the proper HTML support. You can disable flash on your browser then view your site to verify.
6. You should check your site security after moving to the new CMS.
7. Ensure your daily backups are created on an automated process. TEST IT! Perform a site restore to a test site after your first day of being live.
8. Ensure you have a "friendly" 404 page. Offer a search box and your normal site's navigation so users are more likely to stay on your site.
9. Check your site's page load speed with PageSpeed or YSlow.
10. Make sure your client has a solid process in place to handle maintenance. A current client had an issue where after his software was originally installed he never updated. His site was hit by malware as a direct result. A plan should be established as to how software updates will occur.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Job Posting Page and Structured Data Issue
We have a website where we do job postings. We manually add the data to our website. The Job Postings are covered by various other websites including the original recruiting organisations. The details of the job posting remain the same, for instance, the eligibility criteria, the exam pattern, syllabus etc. We create pages where we list the jobs and keep the detailed pages which have the duplicate data disallowed in robots.txt. Lately, we have been thinking of indexing these pages as well, as the quantum of these non-indexed pages is very high. Some of our competitors have these pages indexed. But we are not sure whether doing this is gonna be the right move or if there is a safe way to deal with this. Additionally, there is this problem that some job posts have very less data like fees, age limit, salary etc which is thin content so that might contribute to poor quality issue. Secondly, we wanted to use enriched result snippets for our job postings. Google doesn't want snippets to be used on the listing page: "Put structured data on the most detailed leaf page possible. Don't add structured data to pages intended to present a list of jobs (for example, search result pages). Instead, apply structured data to the most specific page describing a single job with its relevant details." Now, how do we handle this situation? Is it safe to allow the detailed pages which have duplicate job data and sometime not so high quality data in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dailynaukri0 -
Consolidating product pages during website migration
Hello, We are an e-commerce & content site undergoing a website migration and redesign in the coming months. We will be getting an entirely new website. Many of our URLs will be changing: Current URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/product-title-here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katelynroberts
Future URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/product-title-here So we're aware we will be using plenty of 301 redirects to achieve this. Further to this though, we currently have a product page for each configuration of a product - for example, a single-sided bookmark has its own page and URL, and the double-sided version of the same bookmark has its own page and URL. In our site redesign, we are hoping to consolidate each of these instances into one product page where users can select single or double-sided and the price will update accordingly. The bookmark URLs would then go from:
_www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/bookmark-single-sided _(call this URL A for simplicity)www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU67890/bookmark-double-sided (call this URL B) To (after migrating to the new URL structure for the new site, and the now-consolidated single- & double-sided product pages):
www.mysite.com/catalog/bookmark (call this URL C) What is the best way to make this transition without losing too much of our SEO value? I understand there is nearly always traffic loss with URL changes but I'd like to at least minimize the damage as best I can. We have backlinks and ranks for many product pages so I want to make sure we pass as much of this as we can. (And is this at all further complicated by the fact that URL A & B won't exist on the new site, and URL C doesn't exist on the current site? Does this impact the use of the 301 redirects and if so, how?) Are we better off to approach this page consolidation after the site migration and treat it as a separate project? This is something that is important to our user experience, and is definitely a change we want to make. Any advice is appreciated - thank you! I'm a fairly beginner-intermediate SEO so this is all somewhat new but I want to be able to at least convey some understanding to our developer of what we need to do. I was able to find this discussion (https://moz.com/community/q/merging-pages-and-seo) which describes a similar situation and solutions if we were just consolidating the pages but doesn't quite have the complicating factor of the entire site migration happening at the same time. Thanks so much!0 -
Organic Traffic Drop of 90% After Domain Migration
We moved our domain is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com on April 4th. It was migrated to https://www.metro-manhattan.com Google Search Console continues to show about 420of URLs indexed for the old "NYC" domain. This number has not dropped on Search Console. Don't understand why Google has not de-indexed the old site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
For the new "Metro" domain only 114 pages are being shown as valid. Our search volume has dropped from about 85 visits a day to 12 per day. 390 URLs appear as "crawled- currently not indexed". Please note that the migrated content is identical. Nothing at all changed. All re-directs were implemented properly. Also, at the time of the migration we filed a disavow for about 200 spammy links. This disavow file was entered for the old domain and the new one as well. Any ideas as to how to trouble shoot this would be much appreciated!!! This has not been very good for business.0 -
How to fix Category Duplicate Titles Issue?
How to fix Category Duplicate titles and descriptions issues? Most common problem in Wordpress. Example - http://www.abc.com.au/news
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | varunrupal
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/3
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/4
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/5
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/10
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/6
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/7
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/9
http://www.abc.com.au/news/page/80 -
Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?
Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Is there any problem if we migrate the entire site to HTTPS except for the blog ?
Hello guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newrankbg
I have a question to those of you, who have migrated from HTTP to HTTPS. We are planning to migrate the site of our customer to Always SSL. In other words, we want to redirect all site pages to HTTPS, except for the blog. Currently, the whole site is using the HTTP protocol (except the checkout page).
After the change, our customer's site should look like this: https://www.domain.com
http://www.domain.com/blog/ The reasons we do not want to migrate the blog to HTTPS are as follows: The blog does not collect any sensitive user information, as opposed to the site. We all know that on-site algorithms like Panda are having sitewide effect. If the Panda doesn’t like part of the blog (if any thin or low quality content), we do not want this to reflect on the rankings of the entire website. Having in mind that for Google, HTTP and HTTPS are two different protocols, a possible blog penalty should not reflect the web site, which will use HTTPS. Point 2 is the reason I am writing here, as this is just a theory. I would like to hear more thoughts from the experts here. Also, I would like to know your opinion, regarding this mixed use of protocols – could this change lead to a negative effect for any of the properties and why? For me, there should be no negative effect at all. The only disadvantage is that we will have to monitor both metrics – the blog and the site separately in webmaster tools. Thank you all and looking forward for your comments.0 -
Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)
If so how bad? We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues. We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all. Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings. Before I do, can you give me some advice around this? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_B
Daniel.0 -
Countries - Duplication Issues
Hi there, We have a .co.uk website which has been up and running for the past 5 years now and we have now decided because we have a big market in Ireland .ie we want to have a .ie website, the question is, is it ok just to replicate the .co.uk for the .ie website? Are there duplication issues? Kind Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul781