A 6-step guide to building a website migration plan

Website migration is an essential process for keeping a site up-to-date with evolving technology and security standards, involving comprehensive cross-functional collaboration and consideration of budgets, timelines, and resources. Successful site migrations can enhance performance, user experience, and align technologies with current accessibility and safety standards, while also facilitating modern design elements, faster page loads, and smoother navigation for long-term scalability. There are four common types of site migrations: moving to a different domain to preserve search engine rankings and brand visibility; replatforming, which involves switching the site's platform or CMS and affects its structure and tech stack; switching servers to improve loading speeds and security, which requires careful handling to avoid negative impacts on performance and SEO; and consolidating subdomains to unify SEO equity and user experience. Migrations are often prompted by significant site changes, such as integrating new tools, enhancing security, improving scalability, redesigning, updating branding, improving accessibility, adding advanced functionality, or restructuring the site to support growth and internationalization.