Migrating website to new CMS and to https://

[Mat_C]

Hi,

We are migrating an old website to a new one built in Wordpress soon.

We also added an SSL to change to https://

Most of the url's stay the same. Can we just migrate from http to https on server level, and for the url's that do change just set a 301 redirect? Or are there other things we should take into account?

[GastonRiera]

Hi Mat_C

It's great that you are migrating and switching to https.
Regarding the switching on a server level, you can perfectly do it that way. Just remember that you need to address every URL that need to be, redirected to the new site, canonicalized or 404d.
There are a lot of issues to consider take a look in these resources about migrations:
The Website Migration Guide: SEO Strategy, Process, & Checklist - Moz Blog The Ultimate SEO Guide for Successful Web Migrations at #DigitalOlympus - AleydaSolis Migration Best Practices - SMX London 2018 <- backedup by JohnMu in this tweet

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR

[MikeTek]

Hi Mat_C,

For the HTTPS update, you'll want to ensure that all HTTP URL requests are redirected to the new HTTPS versions. Usually this can be done with a global redirect (often it's easiest to do this via your .htaccess file).

However, because you're migrating from what sounds like a HTML site or non-WordPress CMS, your page paths, file extensions, etc will also be changing - so you'll want to map redirects from the old URLs to their new WordPress counterparts more granularly. This should only be necessary for URLs that have external links (links on other sites) referring to them or URLs that users will have stored in bookmarks or will find in advertisements or other referral sources.

We usually look for URLs that have external links using a tool like Moz's Link Explorer and URLs that have Direct or Referral source traffic via Google Analytics / similar.

When you know what old URLs needs to be redirected to new URLs, there are WordPress plugins (like Redirection) that can make this easier than adding an exhaustive list to your .htaccess file or similar.

Best of Luck,
Mike

[Mat_C]

Thanks guys, some helpful tips !