How to Move Your Website

Despite your best intentions when it comes to building and launching your website, situations do occur in which you’ll need to move your website.

Maybe your company is going through a re-branding and redesign process and you’d like your website to reflect your new business name.  Or maybe you’re moving your website to get away from a hosting provider whose actual up-time never quite reflected the guarantee advertised on their sales pages.

But whatever the case, moving a website is a process that should be approached with caution.  Depending on the specifics of your proposed move, it may be necessary to take proactive action to avoid losing the SEO authority your content has built up at its current location.

Here’s what you need to know…

Typically, there are two major types of website moves – hosting provider moves and domain name moves.  The specific actions you’ll want to take to move your site safely will vary based on the type of move you’re completing, so be sure you understand the distinction between the two before you get started.

Scenario #1 – Moving website hosts

As far as website moves go, switching hosting providers while keeping the same domain name isn’t nearly as complicated as moving your site to a new URL.  Because link authority is based on your URL (which isn’t changing in this situation), there’s no risk that you’ll lose the accumulated value of your backlinks when moving your site.

However, when performed incorrectly, a website hosting provider move can result in downtime for your site.  Too much downtime may negatively impact your site’s SEO and rankings, so it’s important to pay attention to the following recommended steps:

• Sign up for your new hosting account at least 1-2 weeks before shutting down your existing plan.  It will take time to migrate your site to its new account, so the last thing you want is for your existing plan to cut off access to your site before the merge is complete.
• Once your new hosting account is set up, move your existing website files to the new account, which you’ll be able to access using an IP address provided by your web host.  Comb through your new site to be sure any issues that cropped up during the move are resolved before your new site goes live.  (Note – if your site runs on WordPress, you’ll need to create a backup database of your existing posts and import this file into your newly created site.)
• After you’re confident that everything on your new site is in good working order, adjust the nameservers on file for your domain name to point at your new hosting account.  Your new hosting account’s support team can provide these addresses to you if you aren’t sure what information to use.

Keep in mind that, when moving your website to a new hosting account, it isn’t necessary to move your domain name registration as well, as your domain name’s nameservers can be adjusted to point at any hosting account.

However, if you do decide to move your domain name (either because you prefer keeping your accounts consolidated or because you got a good deal on renewal registrations by changing hosting providers), you’ll need to release the URL from your previous registrar’s account.  Different registrars have different processes for conducting domain name transfers, but you’ll likely need to supply a code from your old registrar to your new registrar indicating that you do, in fact, want to move your domain name.

Scenario #2 – Changing URLs

As mentioned previously, changing your website’s URL is a little trickier.  If you’ve spent any amount of effort building backlinks to your new site, changing URLs risks losing the value passed by these web addresses, as any links pointing at your old site will no longer be valid.

While it is possible to notify the search engines of these changes in order to diminish the impact of moving your URL, you’ve got to perform the following steps in the right order for this process to run smoothly:

• Start by making a backup copy of your existing website and its sitemap.  You’ll use this old sitemap later on in the process of moving URLs, so take special care to make sure it’s backed up accurately before proceeding.
• Recreate your site on your new URL while your old website is still live (don’t delete your old website until after this entire process has been completed).  Go through the site you’ve created on your new domain in order to correct any internal links that may inadvertently refer visitors to your old site, and then start building new content on your new URL as quickly as possible.
• Add both your old URL and new URL to Google’s Webmaster Tools (if you haven’t done this yet).
• Go back to your old website and add site-wide 301 redirects that tell the search engine spiders that your content has been moved to a new URL.  The easiest ways to do this are with PHP header redirects or WordPress plugins that can add 301 redirects to all pages automatically.
• Now, resubmit your old URL sitemap to both Google and Bing.  This will cause their search engine spiders to reindex your old pages and detect the 301 redirect indicating that your content has been moved.  It’s also a good idea to complete Google’s “Change of Address” form at this point in the process.
• Once you see that the Googlebot and Bing-bot have indexed your old site and taken notice of your redirected content, submit your new URL sitemap to the search engines and wait for them to index the content on your new website.  Pay special attention to your Google Webmaster Tools account – as soon as your new website is indexed, any errors that occurred during the indexing process will appear in your website’s diagnostics section.

Once you’ve addressed any errors that appear in your Webmaster Tools account, you can assume that your transfer has occurred successfully from the point of view of the search engines.  As long as your 301 redirect was set up correctly, the link authority pointing at your old URL should carry through to your new URL, although it may take some time for the search engines to process all of these changes.

But what about your human visitors?  Although you may be tempted to take down your old site in celebration of this lengthy process being completed, consider temporarily putting up a single page explaining to users who enter your old URL directly into their browsers where to find your new content.  Think of it as a “We’ve moved!” courtesy announcement that will prevent visitors who haven’t been on your page in some time from receiving a “Site not found” message that could diminish their trust in your brand.

Alternatively, you could simply create a domain redirect that automatically sends visitors who land on your old URL to your new pages.  If you do decide to take this route, be sure to keep your old URL’s registration up-to-date.  Although this type of redirect won’t offer a personal message to your visitors explaining the reason for your move, it will ensure that they arrive on the correct page after entering your old URL into their browsers.

Image: Daveography.ca