I like tools.
They make your life easier, your workflow more efficient, and allow you to process complex info in a digestible manner.
Website migration projects are no different than any other SEO project plan. They require their own set of tools as a means to ensure that the project runs smoothly.
A funny thing I noticed, however, when I Googled “website migration tools” there was a serious lack of non-Wordpress related tools. There was no guidance on how to migrate a website with a set of tools not found on a WordPress site.
Given how labor intensive a migration can be and how large of a ramification the process can have on SEO, I felt there was a need to talk through some of my favorite tools and software.
Below, I’ll break down the tools by intended use and how you or any website migration consultant can benefit from them as well.
Be sure to account for the necessary tools in your website migration checklist.
Let’s get started!
Planning
A failure to plan, is a plan to fail – read about my worst migration project, if you don’t believe me.
With a website migration, you have to carve out the various tasks that need to be done to ensure a successful project. Doing so will allow you to understand: which resources do you need, and how long does a website migration take.
That said, in order to help me plan accordingly, I’ve used the below tools and software but you may find your development and project teams use something different. That’s ok, a part of the goal of this post is to ensure you understand planning is going to be crucial; whatever medium you use will be fine so long as you plan.
Excel
First and foremost, I use Excel on a daily basis – it’s probably my go-to tool for everything.
I created a spreadsheet that lays out all the tasks, as well as the phase in which we want to accomplish the task, who will be leading, when the task started and ended, its status, and various notes around updates throughout the project. All these pieces of information can help make a migration very smooth.
See the spreadsheet I like to lean on below,
Keep in mind, you may not want to use a spreadsheet permanently, but keeping all tasks, initially at least, in one consolidated file allows the teams to understand the full breadth of the project.
You may find that the teams, particularly project management teams, will want to take the tasks to their PM tool. Which brings me to my next recommended tool.
Project Management Tools
This is going to vary based on teams but the goal is the same – keep track of all the tasks you’ve outlined (possibly from the spreadsheet above) in a location that the larger team can access.
The benefit to leaning on a more formal PM tool is that you don’t have to juggle between various versions of a document. Rather, updates via the PM tool should be accessible to all team members.
Now, which PM tool do you use?
I’ve used Confluence and Jira to track against requirements. I personally love these two tools. They’re really great at allowing you to not just build out requirements (Confluence) but to track issues, through an SEO dev ticket, that might be found throughout the migration project.
Confluence and Jira are owned by Atlassian, and communication between the two is very seamless. Allowing you to reference documentation and tickets between each as well as dictate an assignee for a specific task – keeping the ball rolling on task completion.
However, if you find that you’re not able to use Confluence or Jira, there are other PM tools out there as well including the below,
- Asana
- Trello
- Basecamp
- Monday
There are a ton of PM tools that fit your needs but the goal, again, is the same…
Track against tasks and ensure that critical milestones are accomplished. You could even use Excel – that’s totally fine – so long as you progress towards a migration.
Crawling Tools
I cannot stress enough how important it will be for you and your team to lean on a crawling tool – my favorite being the Screaming Frog SEO web crawler.
The benefit of a crawling tool is that it emulates a search engine as it scours your website and webpages and extracts vital SEO information – you can crawl internal links to identity broken pages, crawl sitemaps to ensure they’re healthy and accurate, pull page titles and meta descriptions to ensure they match your optimizations. That is, you can ensure various parts of a site are optimized, efficiently and accurately before the launch of a site.
An area where I heavily rely on Screaming Frog is when I build my 301 redirect maps. Redirects are a huge component to a website migration as you need to transition a legacy page to a new page. However, instead of simply relying on copying and pasting a URL into the URL bar, with Screaming Frog, you can efficiently crawl a wide variety of URLs and extract their HTTP status codes and redirect behavior in minutes, if not seconds.
What’s more, because you’re working on an upcoming site, you may need to access information behind a login. That is totally doable with Screaming Frog and its Authentication settings. When crawling a website behind a login, you go to Configuration > Authentication > Forms Based. From there, you enter the URL from which you access a login page; you’ll fill out the fields with your login information.
Below is the WordPress admin login page for my site. I’ve used it in the past as I geared up a migration with a site behind a login and emulated a search engine crawl against the soon-to-be launched robots.txt and sitemap.
Lastly, as you’re amassing a list of site URLs you need to redirect from your legacy site, I encourage you to perform a thorough crawl of your site and pull all URLs with Screaming Frog. You can supplement with data but a crawl can help narrow down a list of redirects that will be needed.
Reporting, Data Aggregators, and Tracking, oh my!
There are various data and reporting platforms you’ll want to account for during the migration process. They’re going to vary based on your needs.
That said, I strongly recommend you review the below and ensure they fold into your arsenal of website migration tools.
Google Search Console
In SEO, Google Search Console (GSC) is the de facto tool in our tool belt. GSC is a site hygiene tool with data straight from the horse’s (Google’s) mouth; it includes organic site performance as well as reports on any issues Google encounters.
I’ve used Google Search Console in phases, before and after a website migration.
Before
Gearing up for a launch, I gather all URLs being reported from all data aggregators, including Google Search Console. Reason being, we need to account for all top performing URLs for our redirect strategy. Google Search Console is a good first step for organic search. I add this batch of URLs to an Excel spreadsheet and track against while building my redirect strategy.
After
Naturally, you’ll want to continue retaining visibility to organic visibility as well as site hygiene issues. To do so, you’ll need to ensure Google Search Console continues to remain verified for your site.
What’s more, because you’re migrating to a new experience on new technologies, you’ll want to ensure that the new platform is being well-received by search engines. That is, no errors or issues are popping up as Google becomes more acquainted with your website. Google Search Console reports errors and gives you an opportunity to remedy issues before they spiral.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is much different from Google Search Console. Both report on traffic but unlike GSC, who only reports on organic search traffic, Google Analytics reports on all traffic from all channels. That may include, paid search, email, social media, referrals, etc.
Similar to GSC, I use Google Analytics in phases.
Before
Gather all performance data on URLs. Again, we want to amass all performing URLs and account for them in our redirect strategy. The major difference between the URLs that Google Analytics provides vs. GSC is that Google Analytics is tapping into a much wider pool of URLs.
Because the URLs may be extracted from other channels, there is a strong possibility that the URLs will retain URL parameters (e.g. “?utm=123”). These parameters are much more dynamic and unique and can generate multiple versions of the same page. This is something to keep in mind as you’ll want to ensure your redirect strategy accounts for parameters without being overwhelming on resources. I’ve managed this through Excel formulas.
After
After having launched a site, you want to make sure traffic is normalizing and you’re continuing to retain performance.
Google Analytics is a life saver as it helps you gauge how performance is trending before and after a migration. It also helps you identify whether things are returning to normal, if there are issues, and diagnose where issues may exist (i.e. is it just organic, other channels, a set of pages, etc). In a moment, I’ll talk through how you can integrate GA with Google Data Studio for benchmarking.
SEMrush or Ahrefs
The above tools are great as they allow you to gauge traffic performance. However, in SEO, we want to make sure to track how we’re continuing to rank for our keywords and keyword groups throughout the entire duration of a migration.
That’s where SEO tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs come in handy.
These tools let you track keyword ranking / positioning on a periodic basis, sometimes even daily movements.
After a website migration, you’ll find a ton of volatility taking place on your site. Keyword positioning allows you to track against the volatility and better assess what has changed and why.
For example, let’s say you launch and keywords associated with Category A all decline in rank.
Why???
Well let’s see how these keywords ranked before and after the migration. Which keywords declined? Is it a single keyword or keyword group? What was the URL that was ranking? Is it redirecting? To where? What was the meta data before? Is the page content and meta data still optimized? What changed? Etc.
With these tools, you’re able to better pinpoint where issues are arising and understand what actions might be needed to remedy post-migration.
Excel
Well, well well. Excel.
We’re here again. There is simply an amazing amount you can do with Excel that you really can’t do anywhere else. Between the various formulas you can write out, the sorting and reporting capabilities, it’s no wonder I love this tool.
Some of the great Excel features as they relate to reporting include,
- All the reporting tools covered above allow you to download all its data into Excel.
- I’ve used Excel, almost exclusively, when building out my redirect maps – using 1 column for the legacy URL and another for it’s target
- Excel makes URL parameter management much more efficient with the various formulas
- Ad hoc reporting is much quicker and efficient.
The list goes on but again, Excel is one of the top tools I use on a regular basis.
Google Data Studio
The above tools are great but I’ll be the first to admit that weaving through each of the above can be a bit tedious and overwhelming.
That’s where Google Data Studio (GDS) comes in.
GDS is a data aggregator for data aggregators :).
That is, they can consolidate all Google reporting products into a single location or dashboard through various data connectors. This way, you don’t have to go to GA or GSC separately; rather, you can have data pulled into a dashboard that reports on GA and GSC in a single view. In some cases, like SEMrush, you’re able to pull data from other tools into Google Data Studio as well.
You can set up views where you look back 30, 60, and 90 days to get a sense of the general trend. What’s more, because of its advanced filtering capabilities, you can weave through pages and site sections to silo performance.
GDS can be a HUGE blog post unto itself but if you’re going into a migration project and want to ensure you’re correctly benchmarking, Google Data Studio can be a tremendous help.
QA’ing Tools
During a website migration project, you’ll have recommendations or behavior that you’ve helped build and want to ensure are working properly.
That said, you’re going to need quality QA tools and processes. Here are some of the software that I use to help QA.
Screaming Frog
As mentioned earlier, the SEO web crawler, Screaming Frog, can extract SEO elements from a webpage, specifically, behind a login. As such Screaming Frog is an amazing QA tool during a website migration. You can crawl elements such as meta data, onpage copy, internal links, JavaScript, status codes – the list goes on.
Although, it all depends on what information you’re looking for, Screaming Frog can help you retrieve and QA webpages en masse and in an efficient manner.
Chrome DevTools
If you’re not familiar with Chrome DevTools, it is a suite of tools offered by Google to better understand the makeup of a webpage within the Chrome browser.
At the highest level, you can review HTML code that may be more pertinent to your SEO efforts. That can include items like canonical tags, header tags, and meta data. But you can dive in much, much deeper by looking at nuances at the resource level. That is, what types of files are being called when you visit a URL? Are they a hindrance or slowing down the webpage? What behavior is the webpage undergoing based on these calls?
I use Chrome DevTools pretty regularly, before and after a website migration. Specifically, I use it to update the HTML of a webpage on my local computer. That is, I can tweak a page’s header tag or a content block to better convey a recommendation without affecting anyone else’s experience. Granted it requires slight familiarity with HTML and CSS, it’s a great learning and visualization tool, in general.
Redirect Path
Redirect Path, is a Chrome Extension and an amazing ad hoc QA tool for redirects. I use it when I toggle a redirect for a website migration and need to identify the behavior the redirect is undergoing. The cool thing about this tool is that it allows you to view the various paths and hops of a redirect. That is, if a redirect is undergoing multiple hops, you can discern what the hops are and identify where you might be able to make the redirect more efficient. This can be done within Screaming Frog but, again, Redirect Path is a great ad hoc tool.
Project Management Tools…Revisited
I won’t deep dive into the various project management tools but I do want to call out your QA process throughout a website migration.
When you identify and report an issue, you will more than likely have to outline what the issue is and how to replicate it. From there, you will also have to state how to resolve the issue and will subsequently QA the solution. Each team and their QA process is different but because a website migration is so pivotal to organic performance, you’ll want to ensure that you’re involved in the QA workstream. Granted, some teams may have their own QA representatives, I strongly urge you to review the solutions / fixes through your own SEO eyes.
To better understand how to build an SEO dev ticket, read my post here.
Various Chrome Extensions
There is no shortage of Chrome Extensions online.
If you’re new to Chrome Extensions, they’re essentially pieces of software that you can add to your browser to enhance your browsing experience. Over time, extensions were being built to support a workflow and I’d begun to lean on various extensions throughout my website migration projects.
The below are quick blurbs on some of the extensions I use during various projects.
- Redirect Path: I talked about this moments ago but Redirect Path allows you to review the redirect behavior or a URL.
- Canonical URL Detector: Canonical URL detector denotes, through color schemes, whether a page you’re visiting is the true canonical version or if the canonical exists elsewhere.
- Wappalyzer – Technology profiler: Wappalyzer is an amazing extension that allows you to review the technology makeup of a website. I don’t use it all that often during migration projects but I do use it periodically for site reviews.
- SEO Meta in 1 Click: You can quickly gather meta data as well as other pertinent SEO element information with SEO Meta in 1 Click.
- Hreflang Tag Checker: If your site uses hreflang tags, you may be able to gather if they are set up correctly with this Chrome extension.
- Nimbus Screenshot & Screen Video Recorder: I use Nimbus as I file tickets and attempt to share screenshots and videos of any issues.
- Web Developer: I use Web Developer to disable certain elements, such as JavaScript, to better understand how a webpage functions.
- User-Agent Switcher: I use User-Agent Switcher to toggle between various search engine user-agents and assess what their behavior is with a new site in a migration.
Summary
Well, I bet you thought all you needed was 1 or 2 SEO tools during a site migration.
Yes, in some cases, these tools will get repetitive but how you use them will differ – Excel is an amazing example of a very versatile tool used throughout the migration process.
A website migration is never easy but it doesn’t have to be difficult or impossible. I hope with the tools and software I’ve outlined above, you’re able to maneuver through the website migration process in a more efficient manner, all the while ensuring SEO is top of mind.
Happy migrating!
