The procedure for a technical website migration

Once you have decided to migrate your website to a new platform or a new version of the site, you also need to plan its technical migration.

The technical migration of a website can be defined as a process that changes the web page so significantly that it affects its visibility on search engines such as Google. It is meticulous work that must be carried out by professionals, because there are many technical details to take into account. There are different types of website migration, including database migration, system migration, content migration and CMS migration. But how do you manage the technical migration of a website? And what procedure should you follow to do so?

A successful technical website migration involves several steps that are important to know. This type of project should indeed not be taken lightly. Migrating to a new platform must be done carefully, with the help of a team of professionals who can then provide the right solutions in the event of errors or problems.

First, you will need to prepare the migration by listing the URLs of your pages. This is an effective way to map the site in order to carry out the technical migration project successfully. Planning the project also means defining the scope of the migration, that is, the type of migration chosen and the impact it will have on your site.

Preparing the migration also means setting up a team of specialists around a technical project manager, whose goal will be to determine the best type of CMS migration for managing the site's content. The team should include a graphic designer, a developer and, of course, an SEO specialist.

Good management of a technical migration also means choosing the best time to carry it out, an aspect not to be overlooked, particularly  for an e-commerce site. It is indeed better to avoid carrying out this process during holiday periods, the end-of-year festive season or peak trading times. The aim is to limit the loss of revenue while the site is unavailable. Once the migration technique has been chosen, you will need to ask everyone involved in the project about their expectations in order to define the objectives.

Managing the technical migration also requires you to merge several sites when, for example, your platform offers content covering the same subject. You should consider merging that content into a single page. A web migration also involves a change of design or a change of CMS. To do this, you will need to clarify the SEO specifications through the URL structure, the information relating to meta titles and meta descriptions, and the page loading time, which is one of the CMS checkpoints. Likewise, changing the products or services on the site falls within the scope of technical migration because of the change in architecture.

Switching URLs from HTTP to HTTPS is part of the SSL migration which requires installing on your server an SSL/TLS certificate issued by a certificate authority; HTTPS is also a signal taken into account by search engines such as Google. It is an essential step in the technical migration process. The other important procedure not to be overlooked is backing up your site's database. Before any migration, you must therefore make a complete copy of the site's database and files, and keep it off the server. The aim is to prevent any problem during the migration, in particular the loss of data from the old website.

Finally, good management of the technical migration also involves choosing reliable web hosting. You must choose between a physical server (dedicated or shared) and cloud hosting. This will depend largely on your budget and the expected traffic.

The last step is to test whether or not the migration has succeeded. This test must be done on staging, before the site goes live on the new server, and then again in production. You can, for example, test the redirects. You must also check the SEO of such a technique, and whether it meets the requirements of the data migration strategy defined during project planning. Tests can be carried out with various free tools, such as Google Search Console (indexed pages, crawl errors, duplicate content flagged in the Page indexing report), Google Analytics to monitor traffic, or Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools. Crawlers, free or paid, complement them.

Technical migration covers several types, but some are used more than others.

First, there is storage migration, which consists of transferring files from one computer to another. This process can also be carried out from a device to a site or to a cloud service.

Next, there is database migration proper, which consists of moving the database to another server or to another version of the database management system (MySQL, for example). This process often goes hand in hand with updating the site or changing hosting provider.

Application migration, for its part, combines storage migration and data migration at the same time. In this case, the migration also affects your site's installation folders. It resembles an IT migration. It is an increasingly common process for migrating an e-commerce site to the cloud, to AWS (Amazon Web Services) for example, while keeping all its features. Open source software exists to make this technical migration easier.

As for the data migration strategy, you will have the choice between a Big Bang migration and a Trickle migration.

With Big Bang, the data is transferred within a limited period of time. The data is extracted, transformed and loaded (ETL process) in one go to a new medium or to the cloud. The advantage of a Big Bang technical migration is that it is fast and simple to organise; its drawback is that the systems concerned are shut down during the transfer, which should be scheduled during a quiet period.

Trickle migration, on the other hand, is a process carried out in phases. The new and old systems run in parallel. The advantage is to avoid site downtime that would hamper the company. In addition, continuous data migration is also an important strength of this technique. Although it requires precise IT knowledge, this technical migration method safeguards data quality.

To conclude, data migration remains a technical operation for changing your site's design or the way content is managed, using systems such as MySQL. You may be able to do this kind of work yourself if you have knowledge or resources in the field of code and master this environment. However, depending on the system chosen, the best solution is to call on a specialised agency to avoid the inconvenience caused by a lack of experience in this area. Having a good data migration plan is therefore the guarantee of a successful operation. Indeed, the work does not stop at the technical migration: you will also need to review and monitor the SEO of the web platform once it has been migrated. You may also want to add applications or new features.

• design migration
• editorial migration
• migration after a rebrand