Migrating to Magento 2 from any other eCommerce platform is a big move.
Sure, Magento 2 offers a lot of new and improved features that enhance user experience and other things. But this is only possible when the Magento 2 Migration is executed properly.
If not, it could easily lead to a dramatic drop in organic SEO traffic and thus, the overall revenue of your eCommerce store.
In short, precise planning and professional implementation is a must to ensure a smooth transition.
Now, if this is the first time you’re migrating your store to Magento 2, chances are you’re likely to miss some key factors during the migration process that will eventually lead to a loss in organic SEO traffic.
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How to Avoid Losing Organic SEO Traffic Loss Due To Magento 2 Migration?
Here are the tips that you can follow while migrating your Magento 2 store to avoid losing organic SEO trafic.
1. Identify Affected Pages Due to Migration & Submit Them to Google Search Console
Once the migration process is complete, you need to identify the pages that got the worst hit in terms of SEO traffic, rankings, and conversions.
You can easily identify such affected pages on your store by simply monitoring the traffic loss using Google Analytics or any other third-party analytics software.
Once you’ve found all the affected pages, you need to submit them to Google Search Console for Re-Indexing.
Apart from this, you should also create and submit a new and updated sitemap of your store.
2. Manage Inbound & Outbound Links Post-Migration
Make sure to keep the URLs of all pages on your store as they were during the pre-migration stage. This will help to keep their advantages intact post-migration.
And as far as the changed URLs are concerned, you need to apply appropriate redirects like 301, 302, 401, etc to make sure all inbound links are directed towards the right URLs.
Doing this will avoid any effect on your SEO rankings & link-building activities.
3. Ensure Proper Data Migration
Magento 2 platform is significantly different from the Magento 1 platform.
So, you’ll need prior knowledge as well as experience to successfully migrate important data like product data, metadata, categories, orders, customers data, content, and more from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
For this, we highly recommend taking two different backups - backup of the entire store and backup of resource on your server.
This will basically help to ensure that all your data is highly secured in case of any mistake, disaster, accident, or mishap.
4. Choose the Right Time for Migration
Magento 2 Migration is a time-consuming process and generally takes about 3 months.
This is why we always recommend avoiding picking high sales & traffic seasons and instead, use the slack time for migration to minimize revenue loss.
Reviewing the past data of high sales & traffic in your Google Analytics can easily help to identify a safe time for Magento 2 migration.
5. Perform a Thorough Store Testing Post-Migration
Once your store is successfully migrated to Magento 2 platform, we also recommend using “No-Index” tags to restrict pages from crawling or simply restricting pages from crawling using the Robots.txt file.
This will allow you to thoroughly test and ensure the UX, performance, responsiveness, etc. of your newly migrated online store without impacting its previous rankings in the search engine result pages.
Also read: Why Upgrade to Magento 2 and Not Stay on Magento 1?
Concluding Thoughts…
After reading this post, you might have already realized that migrating to Magento 2 platform is a big task that requires a lot of time, resources, and experience.
Therefore, we always recommend getting outside help to ensure zero downtime of the existing store, full data recovery, and zero loss of organic SEO traffic.
In other words, you must partner with a reliable Magento agency like MageDelight that provides professional Magento 2 Migration Service with a proven track record of successful migration projects.
That being said, if you’ve any queries regarding this post, please ask them in the comments below.
And if you need our professional assistance, feel free to contact us at any time.
