Get your site migration wrong and the path to recovery could take time

There are many good reasons to revise your site design, content architecture and user experience in regular intervals. The design process is after all a make, learn, remake process.

In a Natural Search driven web community the need for content to evolve and be open and accessible to search robots, social media communities mean that content architecture should always be in a state of flux.

The above example shows what happened when Homebase at the beginning of April re-launched their site.

When any migration takes place it is imperative to make sure the site can be read appropriately and that all individual pages are permanently redirected to their new page, or the most relevant page associated with the content. In such situations multiple 404 pages can return if this is not done correctly. Drops in positions and potential loss in traffic and customers will therefore occur.

A good site will always recover, but with site wide position losses across high value search terms the question is at what cost?

Mitigating Risk and tracking outcome in Site Migration

For such a major event for a business it is essential to have daily tracking on the progress of the site migration. Pi Datametrics tracks URLs (not just domains) daily and delivers position alerts on any specified term - the web teams can therefore minutely analyse if the most appropriate pages are returning for the relevant search terms and mitigate any risk immediately.