10 Website Migration Risks & How To Mitigate Them
Website migrations can enhance user experience, improve site performance and optimise SEO.
While these changes can bring benefits, the site migration process also comes with risks. Without correct management, website migration risks can result in traffic loss, ranking drops, and SEO penalties.
The stakes are high for businesses, especially large enterprises. One small misstep during migration has the potential to diminish visibility and revenue.
We’ll explore ten common website migration risks that companies face during the migration process and provide actionable steps to reduce them.
To have an experienced team handle the process, our website migration service includes SEO professionals to ensure you get the most out of a migration.
1. Inadequate Planning
Risk
Lack of a detailed migration plan can lead to missed steps, overlooked issues, or chaotic execution.
Without a structured plan, critical aspects of the migration—such as SEO optimisations, redirects, or technical checks—might be neglected, resulting in site downtime, broken links, or a drop in rankings.
Mitigation
To avoid these risks and ensure a successful website migration, it’s essential to define clear objectives and outline what you want to achieve. Examples include improved site speed, enhanced user experience, or a new domain.
Set realistic timelines with key milestones to track progress.
Assign specific responsibilities to your team members, ensuring everyone knows their role in the migration process.
Comprehensive checklists should be used to ensure that every aspect of the migration, from technical SEO to content transfer, is accounted for.
2. Unidentified High-Value Pages
Risk
Missing critical high-traffic or high-conversion pages during the migration process can lead to a severe loss of traffic, revenue, and search engine rankings.
These pages are often the backbone of your site’s performance, driving the majority of organic traffic or conversions. If they’re overlooked or not properly redirected, you could experience significant drops in both rankings and user engagement.
Mitigation
To prevent this, analytics tools like Google Analytics or SEMrush can be used to identify and prioritise your high-value pages.
This includes pages with the highest traffic, the most conversions, or those that are otherwise crucial for SEO.
Once identified, ensure that these pages are properly preserved during the migration to the new site and mapped to their new URLs if the structure changes.
Use 301 redirects for these key pages to ensure that users and search engines are correctly redirected to the latest content, preserving traffic and SEO value.
3. Poor Backup Practices
Risk
Not creating a full backup and a staging site can result in permanent data loss if something goes wrong during your migration process.
Whether it’s a technical failure, a missed redirect, or an issue with content migration, the lack of a complete backup could cause valuable data, files, and configurations to be lost irretrievably, leading to significant setbacks.
Mitigation
To prevent this, backup all site files, databases, and configurations before beginning the migration. This includes:
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Content,
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Themes,
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Plugins,
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User data and any other essential components of your website.
A comprehensive backup will be your safety net, so you can restore your site quickly if something goes wrong during the migration.
4. Underestimating URL Changes
Risk
Changing URLs without proper redirects can result in broken links and a loss of rankings. If old URLs are not correctly redirected to their new counterparts, users and search engines will encounter 404 errors.
This can cause traffic to drop and SEO value to be lost, as search engines will treat the new pages as completely separate from the old ones.
Mitigation
To prevent this, you should map all old URLs to new ones before a successful migration.
Use 301 redirects to make it so users and search engines are automatically redirected to the correct pages.
Thoroughly test the redirects before going live to confirm they work as expected. Don’t create redirect chains or loops as part of your overall migration monitoring.
5. Redirect Errors
Risk
Redirects that point to incorrect pages creating endless loops or form chains, can severely disrupt both user experience and search engine crawling.
These issues can confuse users by sending them to the wrong page, and search engines may need help to properly index your site, potentially resulting in ranking drops and decreased traffic.
Mitigation
To avoid these problems, audit all redirects using tools like Screaming Frog or similar website crawling tools.
These help you identify any faulty redirects, such as those that lead to incorrect destinations, create redirect chains, or result in loops.
Once identified, fix them promptly to ensure that each redirect points to the correct page and that the redirect chain is as short as possible.
6. Canonical Tag Mismanagement
Risk
Improper use or misconfiguration of canonical tags can lead to duplicate content issues or cause search engines to ignore your preferred pages.
When canonical tags are set correctly, search engines know which page to prioritise. If this isn’t prioritised, your SEO efforts could be diluted, and your ranking problems could be caused.
Duplicate content can also confuse search engines and reduce your site’s overall authority.
Mitigation
To prevent this, ensure that canonical tags point to the correct version of each page.
Double-check that each page on your site has a unique and accurate canonical tag indicating the preferred URL for indexing.
This is especially important when there are similar or duplicate pages, such as product variants or content syndication.
Regularly audit your canonical tags using SEO tools like Screaming Frog to ensure they are properly implemented and aligned with SEO best practices.
7. Broken Internal Links
Risk
Internal links that point to non-existent or outdated URLs can create a poor user experience and result in link equity loss.
When users encounter broken links, they’re likely to leave the site, increasing bounce rates and damaging engagement.
If search engines encounter broken links, it can harm your site’s crawlability and impact SEO performance.
Mitigation
To prevent this, audit and update all internal links during the migration process.
Use tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to identify broken links and ensure that they are redirected to the correct pages.
Take the time to manually review your site’s structure within your content management system, ensuring that all internal links lead to valid, relevant URLs. This boosts both the user experience and maintains SEO value by ensuring that link equity flows correctly throughout the site.
8. Duplicate Content
Risk
Duplicate content can occur when mismanaged redirects, incorrect canonical tags, or inconsistent URL structures cause the same or very similar content to appear on multiple URLs.
Search engines need to clarify which version of the content to index and rank. Otherwise, your SEO efforts may be diluted, and your site’s overall authority can be negatively impacted.
Mitigation
To prevent issues, use tools like Sitebulb or Screaming Frog to detect and resolve any duplicate content problems.
These tools can crawl your site and identify pages with duplicate or near-duplicate content, helping you quickly address issues like misconfigured redirects, improperly set canonical tags or inconsistent URLs.
Properly managing content duplication ensures that search engines know which page to prioritise, preserving your SEO value and improving crawl efficiency.
9. Backlink Devaluation
Risk
Broken backlinks or poorly managed redirects can result in the loss of valuable link equity. When external sites link to your old URLs that no longer exist, or if 301 redirects are not correctly implemented, you risk losing the SEO value from those backlinks.
Mitigation
To mitigate this risk, identify backlinks pointing to old URLs and ensure that they are properly redirected to relevant new pages.
Use backlink analysis tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find backlinks that could be broken after the migration.
Implement 301 redirects to preserve link equity and direct users and search engines to the appropriate new URLs.
10. Core Web Vitals Impact
Risk
Changes in site design or platform during migration can negatively impact key performance metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
These metrics are part of Core Web Vitals, which directly affect user experience and also SEO rankings.
A site redesign or platform switch might lead to slower load times, visual instability, or unexpected element shifting. These can all worsen performance indicators and hurt your rankings.
Mitigation
To mitigate the risk, focus on optimising site speed and layout consistency during the migration process.
Use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to evaluate and improve these Core Web Vitals.
Ensure that key elements load quickly and the layout remains stable as the page renders, particularly for mobile users.
Want an Experienced Migration Service?
A successful site migration requires expertise to ensure a seamless transition without risking SEO performance, traffic, or user experience.
At Prosperity Media, our team specialises in managing complex website migrations for enterprise-level companies.
We’ll handle the technical details, preserve your SEO value, and ensure your site performs optimally after the migration. Contact us today.
Matthew Barby, Senior Director of Acquisition at HubSpot
"Whenever I have companies ask me if there are any great agencies in Australia, I always point them to Prosperity Media. James and team are always pushing out incredibly impactful work, and their depth of knowledge around SEO and content marketing is up there with the best in the world."
