5 Tips to Move Your WordPress Blog to a New Address Without Impacting SEO

There is a misconception that it is not possible to migrate your website or blog to another host from WordPress. Some call on a professional. But no matter what your solution is, it’s something you can do yourself if you follow our tips on the subject.

1- Clean up 404 errors and missing images

During a site or blog migration, several complications can arise. Among them, there is the link break or the famous Error 404 which directs to non-existent pages. We will therefore give you some tips that will allow you not to lose your SEO when migrating your platform.

It is advisable to use a broken link checker here. On WordPress for example, you can use the Broken Link Checker plugin. Such a tool will allow you to carry out a complete analysis of your site. This solution is not free, but if you are looking for another free one, then you can make use of Atomeso.

Note that this procedure will prevent you from having to lose on SEO. In addition, you should also ask yourself if you plan to migrate the low-performing pages or not, when you change hosting. In this regard, the advice we can give is to take into account the size of the articles.

If the content of a page does not exceed 500 words, it is possible to get rid of it easily. Indeed, today, the best optimized content on Google is a minimum of 1000 words. But a little more precisely, you will go to the history of your Google Analytics account.

You’ll go to “Acquisition,” then “Channels,” then “Landing Page.” The history to be taken into account must cover a very long period, one to two years. Pages that are not in this option may not be migrated.

2- Import 301 redirects

If you don’t understand this terminology, it actually means that old links need to be redirected to new ones. In other words, it is a question of ensuring that the paths that lead to your content, and that were already known to your Internet users, are not modified.

This step requires you to log in to your Htaccess editor. To proceed, you can take inspiration from various tutorials available on the web. However, this is not an operation to be done on the spot, it is important to think about it.

In addition, it is advisable to ensure that search engines do not index the new site before moving content. The consequence of doing the opposite is that Google will index links without content, which will greatly harm your SEO strategy.

To block search engines, all you need to do is include a Noindex tag in the HTML meta of your pages. Thus, as soon as Google’s robots see it, they will delete the page from their database.

The process also applies to your backlinks. You can use a tool like WebMeUp to check if your links are still trustworthy.

3- Check the tags

It is important to maintain your level of natural referencing, to migrate your tags. These are the meta title tags as well as your meta descriptions. It is also important to have a SiteMap. This will allow you to crawl the pages of your new site.

It will also be necessary to ensure that the meta tags and the H1 and H2 titles are not double. You can use Screaming Frog to do this. This procedure will be ratified by an SEO audit to verify that the download time (below 600 ms) is the right one and that there are no blockers on the pages.

So to speak, all the lights will have to be green. Afterwards, we will have to submit this to Google to advance the indexing process by Googlebots. But in order for this result to really be achieved, you need to keep a constant eye on your SEO strategy.

So pay attention to the quality of the content you put online. In order to refine these results, don’t miss out on making use of SEO plugins.

4- Ensure that the analysis tools are installed

You are changing your address, then this step is very important for you. On the other hand, if you have just redesigned your site, this step will not be essential. On the other hand, you have to pay attention to this: when you migrate from HTTP to HTTPS, Google considers it a new domain name.

In any case, you must understand that it is not at all easy to migrate a site and succeed in maintaining your SEO when the domain name changes. That said, if this is the case, it is still possible to minimize the damage.

You’ll need to set up Google’s search console on the older version of your web platform. Next, you will go to the “Change of Address” option. This is like making a change of domain. Better still, it is a transfer of “SEO strength” to your new web interface.

5- Launch the indexing properly

The online publication will be done from that moment on. So you need to use Google’s search console. You will therefore have to click on “Explore” and then on ” recover as Google “. The operation must be done by the Google Search Console, not by a smartphone.

You will then click on “Indexing Request” to start the process. But the most important point here is to have taken care to successfully carry out everything that has been said above. Initiating indexing at the wrong time will negatively damage your SEO. This way, all your pages will be indexed and saved in Google’s database.