The migration

When transitioning from one site to a new one, several elements are likely to cause a loss of visitors:

• The old URLs continue to be offered by search engines after the new site goes live. It indeed takes some time for the bots to crawl and index the new version of a page.
• Some links from other sites, particularly social networks, refer to deeper pages than the homepage.
• A page that receives many links is potentially more interesting than another that receives few.

Therefore, if nothing is put in place to ensure that links to the old pages lead to a page on the new site, Google will not be able to transfer the acquired popularity from the old site to the new one, and it will be lost.

To ensure the proper transfer of old URLs to the new site, we recommend setting up 301 redirects. We propose to perform a URL-by-URL matching between each page. To do this, we try to find the equivalent page or one with a similar theme to carry out its redirection. This document is usually passed on to the web developer who will integrate it into the site via the htaccess file.

The file sitemap.xml aims to gather all the available pages on the site to facilitate indexing during the crawl by bots. If this file existed initially, it will need to be updated with the new URLs. If the old site did not have one, we recommend creating one, ensuring to mention all the URLs to be indexed.