How to Migrate Your Old Website to WordPress Without Losing SEO

As an agency owner, I saw a huge amount of website migrations, and in this article, I’ll try to help you understand that this is a risky job in terms of SEO if you neglect core principals, especially if we’re talking about migration of an old website with decent amount of SEO traffic.

So, if you’re about to start a wordpress development project for a client with a website that looks very outdated, but keeps top positions in google search please note key things:

• SEO performance and traffic matter more than looks
• Website may look ugly, but load very fast
• And in most cases Tech SEO is amazing

How to check current website state and positions?

What to check in website Analytics?

Check Google Search Console and Analytics to see the pages that drive the most traffic. After migration, a lot of things will be changed, but these pages should have as much similar tech foundation to old website as possible:

• Heading (h1)
• URL – should be exactly the same or redirect created from old url to new url
• Title, Description and other metadata
• Headings and content structure

How to check website speed?

Don’t rush to launch Google Page Speed or GtMetrix or othe popular tools for page speed. These tools are showing “lab” results, that are good starting point but for websites with enough traffic, there is aggregated data for last 28 days from real Google Chrome users of your website

This data is much more accurate than a lab test, so. A huge tip is to pay more attention to seconds under each of CWV data than to numbers of instant test

No data in core web vitals? Congratulations, more likely there is not much traffic and you can’t mess up the SEO part of migration

How to check Tech SEO?

Tech SEO means all the measures applied to website that affects SEO and usually are checked by one of the popular SEO tools:

• SE Ranking
• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• etc

Run the audit and save for later, so you’ll be able to compare results after redesign and migration to wordpress is completed.

What are the most important tips in migrating to WordPress?

1. Backup existing Website

Back up your site’s data and files before you start. It’s your ‘undo button’ in case anything goes wrong during the migration. Also, please do all the work locally with live testing in the staging/test environment on a subdomain or a temporary domain

2. Choose a Reliable WordPress Development Agency

To minimize SEO risks, consider partnering with a WordPress development agency. Experienced teams can navigate complex migrations while ensuring your URL structures remain intact and your site stays free of broken links.

3. Keep the same URL structure

The worst things that I saw were happening when pages were indexed in Google, but the URLs are changed, so when the user clicks, instead of page, he lands on a 404 page. This is clear signal to google to remove the page from search results – exactly, what we’re trying to avoid.

4. Optimize the design for user experience

Good user experience – UX – helps users to spend more time on the website, and this gives Google a signal that the page is worth ranking higher. It’s not so visual, as layout and structural changes.

5. Keep the same metadata, titles, schema and heading structure

I am sure some changes required, but migrate the old data is better than leave this data empty.

6. Do page speed and Tech SEO test after redesign

Compare the new results with what was before. Ideally, everything should be better than before in tests. More likely, the success of the migration is in this last step. Don’t rush going into production until all pages have been checked and made better than previous in speed, layouts, metadata, and other things