I recently had to move my website to another domain, and this process was more complicated than I thought, but also instructive. At first, I was concerned about how this move would affect SEO, user experience, and technical settings. However, by taking it step by step and implementing the right strategies, I discovered how manageable the process actually is. In this article, I will share from my own experiences what you should pay attention to when moving your website to a new domain, the possible difficulties you may encounter, and how you can complete this process smoothly.
Transferring a website to a new domain requires careful planning and precise execution. The slightest mistake can ruin your SEO efforts and cause financial losses. Therefore, it is extremely important to take the right steps in the website migration process. This website migration guide offers you the points you need to pay attention to and the step-by-step path to follow when moving your site to a new domain. Now let me explain step by step how to carry out the website migration.
What is Website Migration?
Website migration is the process of moving a website from its existing domain name, hosting service or server to another domain, hosting service or server. This process involves transferring site data, files, and settings to a new platform. Website migration may occur for a variety of reasons, such as:
- Domain Name Change: When the existing domain name needs to be changed.
- Hosting Provider Change: When the hosting provider needs to be changed to provide better performance, cost savings or better customer support.
- Server Change: When it is necessary to migrate to a more powerful server, usually to meet increased traffic or performance needs.
- Site Restructuring: When major changes need to be made to the structure or content of the website.
- Security: When it is necessary to switch to a more secure hosting solution.
Website migration requires careful planning and execution. Otherwise, data loss, decrease in site performance or loss of search engine rankings may occur. Therefore, it is important to make backups, properly set up 301 redirects, and notify search engines during the migration process.
Do Website Migration Planning Correctly
The initial step is the most pivotal stage of the website migration process. This first step covers the planning process. During planning, you should clearly determine your reasons for moving the site, what changes will occur when moved, what you should pay attention to when setting up the new site, and your goals. If you ignore these elements, the installation may be incomplete and these deficiencies may lead to both loss of time and loss of authority in search engines.
Buy a Domain Name
Before you begin the website migration process, the first step is to purchase a new domain name. You can perform this operation from many domain name providers. The criteria you should consider when buying a domain name are:
- If your desired domain name is available, give preference to the “.com” extension. If “.com” is full, choose the “.net” extension. If both extensions are full, you can consider other extensions. This is because people trust sites with “.com” and “.net” extensions more.
- Ensure that your domain name does not exceed 15 characters in length..
- Before purchasing the domain name, check if the domain you are interested in has a history by doing a little research on the Google search engine. It would be better to choose a domain name that has no history. If the domain name you are interested in has a history, it is important that this history is clean.
Be Sure To Back Up Your Website
It is extremely important to take a backup during the website migration process. As we mentioned before, this process is quite risky and even the slightest mistake can lead to irreversible problems. Therefore, it is necessary to proceed with a backup in order to carry out the migration smoothly and without errors.
Before starting the site migration process, back up the latest and working state of your site to ensure that you can return in case of a possible situation. Let’s explain this process for those who do not know the backup process.
Backup During Website Migration
Taking a backup is critical when moving a website. As we mentioned before, the site migration process involves many risks and even the slightest mistake can cause irreversible problems. In order to get through this process in the smoothest and error-free way, it is essential to proceed with a backup.
Before starting the migration process, do not forget to backup the current and working status of your site. This enables you to revert to the previous state if any issues arise. For those who do not know the backup process, let’s explain these steps in detail.
- Log in to cPanel.
- On the page that appears, find and click the “Backup Wizard” box.
- When you access the backup wizard, you’ll encounter two options: “Backup” and “Restore“.. Since our intention is to create a backup, we will click on the “Backup” button.. If you wish to restore a previously taken backup, you should select the “Restore” option.
- After clicking the “Backup” button, you will be presented with the “Full Backup” and “Partial Backup” options. Since we want to backup the entire site, we must continue by selecting the “Full Backup” option. Press “Full Backup”.
- In the “Backup Destination” section, you have the option to select “Home Directory.” By selecting this, your backup file will be saved in the home directory of your FTP files.
- You can also write your e-mail address in the “E-Mail Address” section. If you write, you will receive an information e-mail when the backup process is completed.
- When you receive the information email, click on it to initiate the download process..
- On the page that opens, there will be a downloadable file with the extension “.tar.gz” under the name “Downloadable Backups”. Please click on it to start the download process..
This file you downloaded is your backup file. When you want to restore the backup, you should use the restore option we mentioned in step 3 and select this backup file by clicking “Select File” from the page that opens.
Close Your Site to Search Engine Bots
Search engine bots crawl your website on a daily basis. As a result of these scans, it captures the new additions and changes made to the site and shares it in its updated form in the search engine.
In an algorithm with such high crawling intensity, you need to close the new website you will migrate to search engine bots. Because, after the migration process is completed, search engines will visit the new website and encounter the same content as your old website. In this case, you may be remembered by search engines as a website full of duplicate content.
After the migration process is completed, you can make the new website visible to search engines by redirecting the old website to the new website with a 301 redirect.
Now let’s implement the necessary steps to turn off the visibility of our new website to search engines.
Closing with Robots.txt
Access the “robots.txt” file in your server files via FTP (Filezilla) and open it. If not, you should create a new file named “robots.txt” in the main directory.
After opening the robots.txt file, write the following codes in it:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
With the above command, all search engine bots’ access to your website is restricted and they cannot reach your site.
Disabling Search Engines in WordPress
To block your website from search engines in WordPress, follow these steps:
- Log in to the WordPress admin panel.
- Access the page by following the steps Settings > Reading in the left menu.
- If you check the box right next to the “Search engine visibility” heading, you will close the site to search engines.
Set Up Your New Website
We completed important steps before the move. Now it’s time to prepare your new website. You have purchased the required domain name. Now, connect this domain name with your hosting or server and make necessary redirects. You can then upload your backup files to the new site or do a clean install from scratch and save articles, images, etc. You can add it again.
At this point, we recommend that you create a clean site from scratch and re-upload the articles and images. Otherwise, you will be very likely to experience errors during migration due to domain name change.
Redirect from Your Old Website to Your New Website
We have successfully completed the migration process. Now it’s time to inform the search engine bots. Since the articles and images on the old site will be included in the same way on the new site, if you do not inform the search engine bots, your new site may be perceived as duplicate content and marked as spam. To prevent this situation, you need to make a 301 redirect from your old website to your new website. So, how to do a 301 redirect?
- Access the folder containing your website’s files via Filezilla (FTP) or the server.
- Log into the home directory.
- Find the file named “.htaccess” and open it as “New Text Document” by double-clicking it.
- Paste the codes below on this page.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myoldwebsite\.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.myoldwebsite\.com$ RewriteRule (.*)$ https://yenisitem.com/$1 [R=301,L] </IfModule>
After pasting this code, there is one more thing you need to pay attention to and make changes. Update the “myoldwebsite.com” sections to the domain name of your old website. Likewise, update the “mynewwebsite.com” sections to be your new domain name. Another detail you should pay attention to while doing this is that the part given as “https://mynewwebsite.com” should be changed to “http://”,”https://”,”http://www.”,”https://www. .” to arrange it in accordance with your site.
If the place where you bought your domain name or your server does not define an “SSL certificate“, it is not possible to use the “https” extension. If you use it, you are likely to get errors.
Remember to Set Up the Redirect in Google Search Console
We have made the necessary redirection so that search engine bots can see it, but let’s not forget that Google Search Console redirection must also be made. With the Google Search Console update, search engines will understand that the old site and the new site owners are the same and will gradually transfer the authority score of the old site to the new site. Now let’s talk about how to redirect to Google Search Console:
- Visit https://search.google.com/search-console/about.
- Log in with your Google account.
- If your old site has a “Search Console” record on the page that opens, select the domain name.
- Go to “Settings” from the menu on the left.
- Click on the “Address Change” option on the page that opens.
- Select the “Search Console” domain record of your new site and click “Verify and Update”.
Review Internal Links
If you have reached this step, congratulations, you have completed 90% of the site migration process. The next process includes updates with finer details. If you use internal linking in the articles you have shared or will share, you should change these internal links again. Since you took it from your old site, all articles containing links reflect the domain of the old site.
In this section, you should carefully examine each article and not miss it. Otherwise, when search engines examine it for you and click on the link, they will encounter a 404 error. In this case, it is one of the reasons that is not liked by search engine bots and will cause a loss of authority to your site.
Do Your Checks After All Procedures
We have completed all the procedures. Your site has been moved successfully, but considering that we made a mistake as a human element, there may be linking errors that you missed. This causes search engine bots to access broken links. To eliminate this problem, we need “Screaming Frog”, an auxiliary SEO tool.
Screaming Frog is a program that catches all the errors you miss on the website and is very successful in technical SEO analysis. You have to pay a certain fee to use the “Full” version of this program. However, since they give you a certain trial period when you first download it, you will have enough time to analyze it. Now how to check broken links with Screaming Frog? I would like to touch upon it briefly:
How to Check Broken Links with Screaming Frog?
To check broken links with Screaming Frog, you should follow these steps:
- Open the Screaming Frog program.
- Type your new domain name in the search field in the window that appears.
- Wait for it to perform the necessary scans and when it is 100%, click on the “Response Codes” option.
- On the page that opens, select “Client Error (4xx)” from the option section next to the “Filter” option.
- All links in the window that appears show broken ones. Never forget to fix these.
By performing an SEO Audit with Screaming Frog, you can list many negative SEO metrics and take necessary actions.
Frequently Asked Questions About Site Migration
I have compiled frequently asked questions about website migration below. You can start from any question you want. 🙂
Can I Move My Website to Another Hosting Company?
If you are directing your website to another hosting company, most hosting companies provide free migration. If your hosting company does not provide this free support, you can get support from my content.
Why Should I Close the New Website to Search Engines When Moving the Website?
Since all the content from your old website will be available on your new website instantly, search engines will perceive it as duplicate content. Closing your new website to search engines before the migration process will ensure that the action is completed correctly.
How Do I Know If My Website Has Been Migrated Correctly?
The fact that you do not encounter any errors during the migration process and that all functions on the old website work on the new website after the migration process will tell you that the migration is a successful one.
