What are the most effective ways to communicate CMS migration changes to search engines?

2 Audit your current site

Prior to migrating your site to a new CMS, you should audit your current site to identify any issues or opportunities that might affect your SEO. To do so, you can employ tools such as Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, or Google Analytics to crawl your site and collect data on aspects like structure, navigation, hierarchy, URL structure and format, internal and external links, anchor texts, broken links, page titles, meta descriptions, headings, content, images and videos, mobile-friendliness, responsiveness and usability, site speed performance and security. Auditing your current site allows you to determine what works well and what needs improvement. Additionally, this data can be used to create a baseline for your migration and compare it with your new site later.

3 Implement your migration changes

Once you have your migration strategy and audit results, you can start implementing your migration changes on your new CMS. To ensure that search engines can crawl and index your new site smoothly, it's important to follow the best practices and guidelines for SEO and communicate your CMS migration changes clearly and consistently. This may include creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, implementing 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones, using canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues, updating your robots.txt file, preserving and optimizing metadata, schema, and structured data for new pages, testing site speed, performance, and security on the new CMS, and checking for any errors or warnings that might occur during the migration process. Doing so will help you maintain or improve your SEO.

4 Test your new site

Once you have implemented your migration changes, it's important to test your new site and ensure that everything functions properly. You can use the same tools that you used for auditing your current site to test your new site and compare the data. Specifically, pay attention to the site structure, navigation, and hierarchy; URL structure, format, and parameters; internal and external links, anchor texts, and broken links; page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and content; images, videos, and multimedia elements; mobile-friendliness, responsiveness, and usability; site speed, performance, and security. Testing your new site will help you identify any issues or errors that might affect SEO or user experience. Additionally, you can make sure that your migration changes have been communicated to search engines correctly so that your new site is ready to go live.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?