While it’s easier than ever before, the task of building a functional and attractive website remains a challenge. Getting a personal space up and running can be done quickly, but creating valuable content, optimizing the design and improving technical aspects involves copious amounts of work.

As much as building a website can be a pain, the act of migrating your website to a different location can be equally frustrating. There are several reasons why website migrations occur, but in every case, getting it done properly involves knowing what the act entails.

To help you discover what will be needed to migrate your website successfully, we’ll discuss below a few key points that are must-knows.

Plan Ahead

Arguably the single biggest reason why so many site migrations go haywire is due to a lack of planning. Before you decide to move your website to a new server, you need to consider a lot. Covering all of the bases – from pinging servers with the right redirects to ensuring your finances for the migration are available – in a concrete plan before any action is taken is essential.

At the same time, outlining the more abstract aspects of the move – such as what you wish to accomplish by doing so – is crucial for optimal success. Never begin moving or migrating anything without having the entire plan laid out first.

Understand the Risks

Even when you have a solid game plan for migrating your website, understand that there are hiccups and outright errors that can occur. Perhaps most importantly, remember that any site migration can temporarily disrupt your search engine optimization efforts. Search engines can and often do lose track temporarily of pages that undergo migrations (which is why mitigating these potential issues with a plan is so important).

There are additionally many other technical issues that could occur during or after the migration. As such, including everybody in the process (whether it be copywriters, SEO gurus and/or developers) will ensure most of these challenges are anticipated and can be fixed quickly.

Focus on Content

As alluded to above, your pages may experience a temporary hit in terms of being indexed and ranked by search engines. While there are ways to avoid this from happening, there is still a huge need to focus on each page – and namely, its content.

Moving to an entirely new server can be challenging for many reasons, but even slight changes in directories, links and other on-page elements can render your content broken or irrelevant. As such, be ready to evaluate each page after the migration occurs, including elements such as meta descriptions and links. By doing this, you can make sure that even with redirects handled properly, none of your content is fundamentally rendered useless by a simple oversight.

Website migrations are difficult, frustrating and easy to botch when rushed. Before you begin pinging servers with all of your moved pages and content, understand that planning the process takes time and dedication. By developing a solid game plan before you act, understanding the risk involved and focusing on your content in the aftermath, the process can be much smoother.