It’s been 38 years since I moved from one house to another.
Still I’ve moved often enough to know the process.
It’s exciting and fun to search for a new home. When you find it, dreams of your wonderful future there fill your mind.
The actual moving? It ain’t so easy.
Sure, you can hire a company to just come in, pack everything up, and move it. That will get the job done. But in the process you’ll have moved a lot of things that should have been purged. Items will end up in the wrong rooms at the new house. And you’ll spend time finding a place for items you no longer need or want.
It would be better to purge items before moving and to mark boxes carefully as to where things should go.
Oh, and don’t forget you have to forward your address at the post office.
Every business needs to periodically move their websites to a new platform. And every business dreams their new website will be wonderful
From my experience, I recommend being particularly careful about the process. That’s because I’ve seen it done poorly time after time.
If you’ve hired a new web design company, don’t expect they will be able to “handle everything” even if that’s what they say they will do.
A project manager with institutional knowledge of both the business and the workings of the current website should be dedicated to overseeing the process.
Like you’re home, you’ll want to purge some items. But with a website, those purged pages need to be redirected to a page on the new site. Your project manager can figure out which is the most relevant page to redirect to.
You’ll also want to make sure all the content has been transferred. I’ve seen pages on new websites that had completely wrong content.
Another important matter are all the meta data. Were the tags transferred properly? Usually not.
If you don’t do the above, your rankings in search, both Google and AI, will suffer.
The above and many more issues crop up when moving to a new platform. It’s a big job.
Easy Web Tip 375: When moving your website to a new platform, make sure a project manager with institutional knowledge assists in the effort.
