CMS – Content Management System or software that is made for the creation, editing, organization, structure, and management of a website.
Transferring a website to a new engine is a long and difficult process that allows to correct the disadvantages of SEO, and simultaneously conduct a technical audit of the resource.
The most common are:
Each of the CMS has its own characteristics (layout, database structure, etc.). The complexity of transferring a website to another CMS can be compared to the development of a new website.
That’s why it’s so important to determine the system requirements and select the right functionality.
Below is a list of recommended CMS, depending on the type of resource:
* Don’t forget to make a reserve copy of your project. Only after this step, you can safely move your old project to the test site. Run tests until you find and eliminate all of the errors.
Each CMS forms human-readable URLs in its own way.
When you transfer a project to a new engine, URLs will change. Addresses will change also if the structure of the resource is modified. This may lead to a loss of traffic. Therefore, be sure to configure by page 301 redirects. However, if a web project contains more than 100 pages, then working with redirects becomes extremely time-consuming.
For small websites, you can do redirects manually.
For large, you can use Google Analytics. Further:
When the list of all website pages is ready, create a correspondence table for old and new URLs.
*Make sure that pages which generate most traffic are created on the test site.
The final step – in the htaccess file you should affix 301 redirects.
Transfer all texts. If the project contains a large number of pages, then the work on the transfer of materials should be assigned to developers.
You can manually enter data such as: “Shipping and Payment”, “About the Company”, “Contacts”and other.
Title, description, and H1 should also be transferred.
Create a robots.txt file for the new engine.
You need to generate a new sitemap file and send it to Google for review Search Console. The search engine should re-index new resource pages as soon as possible.
Install the tag manager container.
Now, either through it or directly on the website add all the necessary codes:
*Do not forget to set up objectives, e-commerce and other parameters where the change of URL could be involved.
Required to check the correctness of the display.
The error should be displayed for all URLs with an error and indicate that such page does not exist. It is good if it should contain a link to the main page of the website.
Set the rel = ”canonical” tag to eliminate duplicated pagination pages.
Check out the optimization of the web project for mobile devices through the service https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Use Ahrefs to upload all Backlinks and check if all resource pages for which donors refer to, give response code 200. If there are pages with 404 server response, then make redirect either to the corresponding URL of the website or to the main page.
Before deciding to move to a new CMS, list the desired technical and functional system requirements.
Create a reserve copy of a project.
Following the above algorithm for transferring a web project to another CMS, you can transfer a resource without a significant drop in traffic and losses in search engine promotion. Right after the transfer, the decrease in attendance is possible. Don’t worry its normal. In a month or two, the working process will recover. If you have foreseen everything, the project efficiency on an optimized platform will be higher.