Over the years, I’ve helped dozens of clients with site migrations: rebranding projects, changing to a new domain name, and migrating between WordPress, Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, CubeCart, SquareSpace, ZenCart, Webflow, and even built-by-hand sites.
Catastrophic SEO Mistakes
I’ve helped many clients recover from misguided web development projects. It’s unfortunate, but many web design firms think they know far more about SEO than they really do. Just because you can spell “SEO” doesn’t mean you are one! Here’s a list of some of the more serious mistakes I’ve seen made on my clients’ websites:
- Changing the primary subdomain from www to non-www (and vice-versa)
- Changing from mixed-case URLs to all lowercase URLs (and failing to 301 redirect)
- Changing a ton of key page URLs and presuming that link juice will pass over the 301s
- Presuming Shopify knows what they’re doing with their default robots.txt setup
- Failing to test and tune pages so that they pass Core Web Vitals metrics before going live
- Blocking URLs in robots.txt when they should have used rel canonicals or meta robots “noindex”
- Forgetting to update their DMARC and SPF records for the new site hosting
- Neglecting to recrawl 100% of the old site URLs to make sure all changed URLs got 301 redirected
- Failing to test Googlebot rendering of pages (especially for JS-heavy frameworks)
- Failing to migrate schema markup to the new site
- Using the wrong approach to prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexing the dev/staging site
Common CMS & E-Commerce Platforms
What’s right for one client isn’t necessarily right for another.
I’ve seen clients get talked into spending over $100K migrating a WordPress site to SquareSpace, then a year later, pay someone else to move it back.
Shopify is the darling of the e-com world right now, and it’s great for many clients, but I’ll say this: 90%+ of Shopify sites I audit do not pass Core Web Vitals metrics, and that means worse rankings in Google. The vast majority of so-called “Shopify experts” aren’t able to make this happen. If you’re looking for a great Shopify agency to do your migration, you should be interviewing 20 and discarding at least 18 of them.
Webflow has become very popular with developers (and, for good reason…it’s a very powerful, modern CMS). But like Shopify, it takes a very senior and experienced dev team to make the site really fast–especially if you get sucked into adding in a ton of “bling” in the form of widgets, tracking/analysis widgets, etc. The main reason customers aren’t converting more on your site is NOT because it needs more pieces of flair. Webflow sites CAN be very fast–if you really, REALLY know what you’re doing.
Wix got a bad rap in the SEO community many years ago (and, back then, they deserved it). A bit before COVID however, Wix made major improvements to their platform, and in fact ran a contest (very deservedly won by Marie Haynes’ team) to demonstrate and get PR for their efforts at improving SEO for their clients’ sites.
WordPress is still a very viable solution for many sites–even some smaller e-commerce sites. Depending on the theme you choose, it’s often pretty easy to make the site fast–especially if you use a great caching plugin (I like WP Rocket). Adding too many plugins will definitely slow the site down, but generally you can counter that with a good caching plugin, a good image resizer like Imagify, and careful use of late-loading things like Tag Manager, Google Maps, Recaptcha, live chat widgets, embedded video, etc. Developers are easy to find, hardening the site against hackers is relatively well-understood (or, use a hosting service known for their security like WP Engine), and it’s inexpensive for the license and the hosting.
My Site Migration Tools Hot List
- Page load times & Core Web Vitals testing:
- Webpagetest.org – CWV numbers tend to align best with Search Console’s vs. the other tools, and their waterfall diagrams are great for diagnosing problems
- Pagespeed Insights – despite being a Google product, their CWV numbers are often far off from Search Consoles; however, their recommendations lists can be super useful
- GT Metrix – good recommendations and visualizations
- Schema testing:
- The official validator
- Don’t waste your time with the Rich Snippets Tester
- Fellow Bend, Oregon SEO expert Max Prin created this awesome schema generator tool
- HTTP status and redirect testing:
- Chrome or Firefox Dev Tools – the Network tab (but, can be misled by a cached redirect>
- redirect-checker.org
- Rendering:
- Google Search Console has the final say here (but, only renders about 2 screens worth, and only mobile)
- Max Prin (see above) also created this terrific tool, which allows you to simulate either Googlebot desktop or mobile
- HREF lang testing (for multi-country/language sites):
- Aleyda Solis created this amazing hreflang generator
- This is my go-to tester for hreflang statements
- Google’s documentation on hreflang is actually pretty good
- DNS:
- For DMARC, SPF, and blacklists, I use MX Toolbox
- For everything else, I use Into DNS
