Website Migration & Site Rebuild Analyser
Client: Can you rebuild my website?
You: Sure, it'll be easy!
Almost every freelancer/agency we know has worked on what they thought would be an easy project that turned into a unprofitable nightmare.
This has often due to a lack of analysis at the beginning of the project - no one analysed the old site structure and saw the huge amount of legacy content that would need to be migrated across to preserve SEO rankings, or factored in the time it took to setup 301-redirects.
The key takeaway here is that before accepting a project, one must understand the old site structure, including;
- The number of pages.
- The number of collections.
- The number of locales.
- A list of the URLs.
With this information, you will be able to do three things;
- Identify the new site structure
- Understand how much time/effort is required to migrate content across
- Factor in time/tooling costs for website migration into the project quote.
If you are about to do a website rebuild/migration and want to plan each step, download this FREE checklist!
Quoting Your Website Rebuild Project
Here is a typical list of tasks for a rebuild project;
- Website Design
- Website Development
- Content migration
- 301-redirect mapping
When quoting a rebuild project, you need to factor the time and cost for all of these tasks - and agree on the person/entity responsible for completing them.
The design and development are typically done by the freelancer/web agency - if this is you, you are likely quoting on these two things already.
During initial negotiations, it's strongly advised that you align with your client on who will do the content-migration and 301-redirect mapping as it can be either of you.
We suggest offering the migration and mapping as a paid service (that is in addition to the design/build) while offering the client the option to do it themselves.
The reason for this is that the migration can take substantial time. The 301-redirect mapping will also take substantial time if you do it manually.
Once all this is agreed the project quote and scope is formalised, and you can move forward with proper time and costings for your project.
Planning, Design & Build
With the original site structure in hand you will have a good understanding of the key pages you will need to build, how to setup the CMS and any locales you might need to add.
Ensure these are accounted for in your designs including static page, CMS driven or dynamic pages and page templates.
For the full strategy on doing a site-migration, read this Wordpress → Webflow (the same principles apply for all web builders and CMS's)
If you have a multi-lingual site, this article is a useful resource.
Remember to keep the URLs the same when possible or similar if they cannot be exact matches!
Content Migration
Once you have designed and built the website - and configured the CMS and locales if applicable - it is time to migrate the content across.
If you have included this in the project timeline and budget, the hours spent doing this will be paid. If your client is doing this, it's a good idea to train them and send them a video that they can reference so they can map all of the content.
At the end of this phase all the URLs on your new site should be published on the staging domain.
Preparing For Launch
Once all the content is migrated across, it's time to map 301-redirects to keep SEO rankings intact and ensure all your old links that may have broken during the migration, resolve to new pages.
This can be done manually but after doing lots of rebuilds, we built Rapid301 to automate this manual process.
Simply enter your URLs into the Rapid301 Site Scan to 301-redirects tool or upload your complete sitemaps from screaming frog or equivalent to the Sitemap to 301-redirects tools.
Review the 301-redirects and make any updates before exporting them!
Conclusion
When rebuilding a website, it's very important to understand the old site structure; number of pages, collections and locales.
Factoring the time and costs associated with performing the content migration and mapping 301-redirects is critical in ensuring a project is launched on-time and on-budget.
If you need any help with a migration, please don't hesitate to get in touch!
