A few years ago, I was an IT executive for a company that managed web hosting. Our main focus was on MySpace and Friendster. What we noticed as a business team was that many sites would be migrating to other hosting providers for various reasons, the most common of which was because the individual site owner no longer had any control over the site’s structure or contents. Here are some reasons why companies go with a website migration.
One thing to look at when you’re doing a migration is if the site has any structural changes or alterations that will need to be taken care of. We were often working with large-scale providers who had hundreds of different operating systems in use. When it came time to migrate a site to another provider, we would have to update all the systems we were using. Some things would have to be moved, but more often than not the new provider’s system was always able to handle the task.
Helpful Tips to Migration
Every time a site is migrated, you need to ensure that your network is secure and up to date. If there are any structural changes in the new environment, your network can easily become infected with spyware or malware. It’s much better to be safe than sorry when it comes to security issues. It’s far easier to fix these things in the future than it is to get a new computer if you don’t catch the problem before it gets out of hand.
Structures are an important part of a site. They are where the content is located, how links work, and how the site behaves in general. If you cannot reach the site’s codebase and you find yourself with broken structure changes, you could be looking at issues such as lost earnings, customer relationships, and the functionality of the site itself. It is important to have all of these things in place before you go with migration.
If your site is on a shared server, it’s necessary to take a look at the hard disk space. The site needs to be able to be accessed across multiple networks. How much traffic is the server currently seeing? Is the server running on a shared server, a virtual server, or is it a dedicated server?
For those technical people that read this, you’re already aware of the networking requirements. However, it’s best to think about the total server capacity as well. If your site has tens of thousands of pages and it’s a one-off matter, you may not need to do any other modifications. However, if the site is still going strong, you need to make sure that it’s up to the same standards as the others. Often times you’ll see a site owner trying to downplay the amount of page-load time that the site used to have.
Consider also what is the content of the site? Are you planning on adding new features to it? Do you plan on scaling back the services or redirecting the site? These are things to consider as well.
If you are going to change the content of the site, make sure that you make those structure changes on the server. This way, your customers can view the changes without encountering any problems.
As far as the network is concerned, make sure that the connection between the client and server is stable, and that the routes are secure. If you need to scale back bandwidth or perform other security changes, make sure that you change the structures on the server on a regular basis.
It’s pretty easy to understand the first two issues here. The third is a little harder, but there are some things that should be done periodically, so it’s not too big of a deal.
An organization must be confident that the site they’re migrating to can continue running properly on the company’s own server. Regardless, of whether the site is migrating to a newer hosting provider or going from a soft-modemitted service to a hard-modemitted service provider.
Successful Website Migrations
The successful online migration of websites will entail a few unique aspects that you will need to consider if you want to make it a success. These considerations include:
Quality Web Content
Successful website migrations depend largely on the web content that you create. The quality of the content is imperative to the success of your migration and moving the site to a new location is not a task that can be accomplished easily. The content that you create must be optimized for search engines so that they can find the correct page for your site.
For your site to be found by the search engines, the content must be written in a way that ensures that it is ranked as good quality. It should be able to draw traffic from those users that use search engines to find what they are looking for and will leave it at that.
A Good Navigation Scheme
Uses a system of pages can cause a navigational problem. This can lead to duplicate content issues, confusion, lost links, and many other problems. It is important to create an intuitive structure to your pages that make it easy for visitors to know where to go next.
Be careful not to overload your site with too many links, especially in the navigation. You don’t want visitors getting confused about what pages to visit next.
Search Engine Optimization
Using keywords is a critical part of any website migration and most SEO professionals will recommend creating a list of targeted keywords for your site. This is necessary to ensure that your site appears in the correct places in the search engines. A good SEO professional will have no trouble helping you create these keywords, but you may want to help them out with this work. A good case study would be to look at how iHeartRaves has managed to dominate using this channel.
Check with your prospective company’s services to see what type of keywords they specialize in and what methods they use to optimize for those keywords. After all, your site will be displayed in the right places and it is worth optimizing for a specific keyword that your site can rank for.
Choosing the right web hosting company
Web hosting is a vital component of any successful online migration and choosing the wrong web host can have an impact on the outcome of your site migration. Choosing the wrong web host can lead to problems that can impact the migration.
You should choose a good web host that is well established in the industry and has a proven track record in helping companies migrate their sites. Once your site is in the new location, you will be able to enjoy the results that the company has to offer, such as the flexibility and resources that it offers to migrate your site quickly and seamlessly.
Make Sure Your Host’s Support Your Technology
Make sure that the hosting provider that you choose will also support the technologies that you are using to build your site. This can help you enjoy a smooth transition without any surprises or problems along the way.
Your new website should be accessible through a number of methods, so you should find a company that has had success in offering solutions to the needs of any company that migrating a site. You should also find a company that offers support tools and services that will help you during the process of moving your site to the new location.
Remember that any website migration that you undertake will impact the ranking of your site in search engines. Make sure that your migration plan includes a plan to address these concerns so that you can enjoy a smooth migration.