Safeguard your search rankings
With the right plan and tools, you can boost your SEO and improve visibility on Google rankings after migrating your website to another platform.
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the process of increasing quality website traffic from search engines. Any drastic changes to search engine algorithms or search rankings can have huge repercussions for site traffic and revenue. That's why SEO is an integral component of setting up and maintaining your website.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to safeguard your SEO when migrating to Easol and ensure your site gets seen.
But first – what is site migration?
Site migration refers to a significant change to a website that can affect SEO. It can be one or a combination of:
(1) Protocol migration
It’s now an industry standard to use HTTPS in website URLs due to its enhanced security for users. This means that older websites may have to migrate protocols from “http” to “https”.
(2) Domain migration
If you’re rebranding or changing your business strategy, you may want to transfer your website domain name (i.e. from “oldbrand.com” to “newbrand.com”) or from a subdomain to top-level domain (or vice versa).
(3) Website redesign
Does your website look a little lackluster? Modifications to your website’s layout, content, aesthetics, sitemap, and navigation is also considered a site migration as it can impact SEO.
(4) CMS migration
Is your CMS (content management system) slowing down business growth? Migrating your website’s CMS means changing the backend platform to improve the way you operate and sell experiences.
Switching to Easol from a platform like WordPress, Shopify, Wix, or Squarespace, involves a CMS migration, and in most cases, a website redesign. Easol lets you connect any custom domain name (we’re all about selling on your terms), so you don’t need to worry about a domain migration.
SEO checklist for migrating to Easol
As an all-in-one platform built for experience businesses, Easol comes with a lot of tools to help sell and promote experiences – SEO is one of them. This will help ensure that you have a smooth transition when migrating to Easol.
Our support team is also always within reach if you have any questions during migration. If you’d like an extra helping hand for your SEO needs, we also have an Experts Directory, where you can find an approved Easol expert.
With that in mind, let’s get started with migration!
Preparing for site migration
When you set up your experience business on Easol, you start with a “sandbox environment”. This allows you to edit your new website and prepare for migration without impacting your existing website.
Here’s a SEO checklist of everything you need to do before launching your new site on Easol:
(1) Crawl your old website
The first step to site migration is creating a list of all the URLs of your existing website, otherwise known as a site crawl. This ensures that no pages fall through the cracks during migration.
To conduct a site crawl, you can use a SEO tool like Screaming Frog, Moz, SEMRush, or Ahrefs.
(2) Set up your 301 redirects
Now that you have a list of your current website’s URLs, you can compare them to your new website on Easol and set up redirects.
Redirects occur when a user visits a specific page but then gets automatically sent to a different one. If you plan to remove a page from your old site or change a page’s URL, you’ll need to set up a redirect. This isn’t just best practice for SEO, as it allows search engine crawlers to identify and rank your new pages, but it’s also a better user experience – no one likes ending up on a 404 error page.
Note down all the old URLs that will be removed or changed during migration. Next, create a redirect in Easol, by going to My Site > Redirects and inputing the:
Redirect from – The original path of the older page that you'd like to forward visitors from
Redirect to – The new path of the new page that you’d like to forward visitors to
If your old website has redirections, make sure they’re being accounted for and added to your new Easol website as well.
(3) Add meta tags
Search engines pull information from your website pages’ meta tags in order to understand the page’s content and effectively rank it. While this metadata is not viewed by users on the website itself, search engines usually display this text on search results.
Meta tags include the:
Title – Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages as the clickable headline for a given result
Description – Describes the page to users as they scan through search engine results
Social Media Image – Also known as an Open Graph Image, this is used for social media previews on Facebook, LinkedIn etc. We recommend uploading a landscape image which is at least 1200 x 630 pixels.
Other social media metadata, such as Open Graph Titles and Twitter Cards, are automatically generated by Easol.
Go through each page on your new Easol website and add unique meta tags – don’t forget your experience products as well! If you’ve previously optimized meta tags on your old site, you can duplicate them to your new site in Easol. The site crawl you did earlier with a SEO tool should produce a list of meta tags for each page, alongside URLs, to make this process easier.
(4) Implement analytics
You can’t successfully manage SEO without visibility into your site traffic. Easol allows you to place a Google Tag Manager (GTM) container sitewide, so that you can easily implement the site analytics solution of your choice, such as Google Analytics and Matomo Analytics.
To place GTM on your website, go to My Site > Advanced and input the ID of your GTM.
(5) Final check and testing
It never hurts to double (and triple) check that all your redirects are properly set up, all pages have meta tags, and that your site analytics tools are correctly picking up traffic.
Again, because Easol works as a sandbox environment prior to launch, you can do all your testing without affecting your existing website on your old CMS.
Making the move to Easol
Get the champagne ready, it’s time to launch your new website! To avoid any SEO hiccups, we recommend the following steps on the day of migration:
(1) Crawl your new website and resolve any issues
Once you’ve connected your domain name on Easol and your new website is live, you’ll want to conduct another site crawl. This will allow you to quickly see if there are any major issues, such as duplicate content or broken links.
(2) Check redirection and analytics
Now that the new website is live, test your redirects in your browser and make sure old URLs are properly redirecting to the new ones. Give your analytics a quick check as well to make sure traffic is accurately being tracked.
(3) Update Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a tool to help you monitor and manage your SEO on Google. If you haven’t verified your site with these tools before, we recommend you do so now.
Once your site has been verified, you can update Google Search Console to ensure that Google is correctly indexing your new website:
Upload a new XML Sitemap – this indicates to Google what pages are available for crawling and indexing
Set the Preferred location of the domain (www or non-www)
Set the International targeting (if applicable)
Use the URL Inspection tool to ensure important pages are properly indexed
Use the Robots Testing tool to ensure important pages aren’t being blocked
If you’d like to optimise your website for Bing as well, they have a similar tool called Webmaster Tools.
(4) Monitor search traffic
Using your analytics tool and Google Search Console, you can keep tabs on your SEO performance and organic site traffic. We recommend setting up automated email reports and alerts, so you never miss a site issue.
