It’s better to start talking about website migration with a little analogy. So, imagine that you have a great offline store. In turn, you thought for a long time about where it would be better to rent space for your retail outlet. Then you equipped it, made it functional and beautiful. And one day the owner raises the price to rent the premises. Or there are breakdowns in the building, which are very bad for your business. Maybe they can’t be fixed, or the landlord doesn’t take responsibility for such things. That’s where the need to think about moving comes in. But how do you keep your store the way it was created? How to ensure the most environmentally friendly migration of customers to the new location? Unfortunately, this also happens to websites. Relocation is inevitable for a number of reasons. But that was just an analogy, and our task is to explain to you what constitutes a site migration. In the material on the link you can read the website migration guide and explore the issue in more detail. In addition, there you can ask for expert help in solving this issue.
What is web site migration?
So, let’s move away from the analogy a little bit and start dealing with the terminology. Site migration – any actions that are aimed at changing the settings of the site. This can be a change of domain, hosting, or platform, as well as amendments to the design component of the product. Accordingly, as we said above, this format of action can significantly affect the indexing by search engines and as a conclusion threatens to churn visitors.
Reasons to think about migrating the site
Why do people begin to think about moving their web resource. After all, if you think about it, it’s unlikely that in this case you have identical problems as in the analogy described above. Let’s figure out what causes users to migrate:
- So, the first problem you may encounter is that you are asked for a lot of money, and the quality of the services you provide is not good.
- It may happen that you will not be asked for much money, but you will have a problem with the service. After all, if anything, poor customer orientation, unwillingness to respond quickly to your requests and other turmoil is unlikely to contribute to the development of your business.
- It also happens that the server is decommissioned. There is nothing that can be done. It remains only in an emergency procedure to migrate.
- Sometimes it happens that when you run a Web site, you have enough tools to realize its potential. But, over time, appetites may grow and the resources to have at your disposal will need more.
- And the last most common reason is this change of geography. If you plan to geographically move your resource – you should think about site migration.
What is the migration of the Web site
If you are faced with one of the above situations, it is worth to understand what exactly there are options for migration. Let’s break it down:
- So, the most popular case when you may need this service is the desire to change the design of your web resource. In this case, the “residence of the site” does not change, but the appearance of the site is undergoing major changes. Roughly speaking, people come to a familiar resource, but faced with the fact that they can not recognize it. Indeed, changing colors, navigation options and even the number of pages. Accordingly, after this procedure should take care that your visitors have not lost the site, and with pleasure returned to use it.
- The URL of the resource (aka URL) should be as clear and easy to remember. Sometimes it happens that while creating a site nobody thinks about the purity of the address and it remains a lot of extraneous characters. At this point, resource owners often think about migration. Another reason to change the address – it is the desire to change the domain, or to go to another protocol (to move away from less secure HTTP to a modern version of HTTPS).
- It happens that the site needs to change the domain. This happens if the company has changed its name, or if he needs to designate the location of the resource. There are extensions for a particular country, region and international.
- There is also a need to migrate to a new host. It is necessary if you decide to save your finances from unnecessary costs or your appetite for functionality has increased significantly.
- There is also a procedure for replacing or installing the CMS. Most often, it occurs if the resource is created to order. In addition, the need for this action may be due to growth and the need to automate the process of streamlining pages of the resource.
- There is another type of migration of the site. He is associated with the need to connect to one of several resources.
Thus, you can observe that the options, as well as the reasons for the migration of the site are many. They vary in complexity, but always require the intervention of a professional team.
