Every move is a little bit of death, or how websites change platforms

In Internet marketing, everything is like in life. The site has moved, and you have lost everything: positions; traffic; customer requests. In this article, we analyze two moves: one with a sad ending and one when everything went “tip-top”. We share instructions for a safe move.

How do you know when it's time to move or update your website?

Here are the main reasons for moving:

1. The site was made 10 years ago and is hopelessly outdated, it has a “tired” design and limited functionality. It is easier and cheaper to make it from scratch than to edit what you have.

2. The site is made on a home-made CMS. The editing capabilities are limited. The situation may be aggravated by the fact that the site developers no longer work with you. And the new ones cannot figure out what their predecessors have come up with. Add to this a system of non-standardized or undescribed “cheats” that complicates and clutters the code structure.

3. You feel increased competition. Competitors' sites, unlike yours, are modern and convenient. And they work much faster.

So, the move is going to happen! But things can be different.

Let's look at 2 examples when we moved:

• Right;

• wrong.

Development of a new user-friendly website for a real estate aggregator and relocation “under the supervision” of a marketer

One of our favorite customers is the Ural Chamber of Real Estate (UPN). The UPN website is essentially a regional real estate aggregator. We have been cooperating since 2015.

In September 2021, the customer moved to a new platform. To avoid a drop in positions and traffic, we supported the move.

Thanks to careful preparation, the move was carried out quickly – in a few hours. Preparations for the move and work on the new site began 2 years before the X date.

The customer's programmers developed the site from scratch, without templates and platforms. They had many questions about the logic of the site and modules. For example, how to form:

— website structure;

— sub-filter pages;

— CHPU (human-readable URL);

— catalog of objects.

We described all of this in great detail.

By September 2021, the new site was ready and we made the move.

To ensure the safety of the move, a step-by-step work plan was developed and the implementation was monitored:

1. Created a redirect map.

To create a redirect map, we had to find all the pages. There are 30,000 of them on the old site, and more than 100,000 on the new one.

We encountered a difficulty. The site has a blocking from scanning – protection from IP addresses with suspicious actions. I had to collect a list of pages manually using the service file sitemap and the Yandex Webmaster panel. This is a lot of work, it took more than 20 hours of work of an SEO specialist.

2. We placed the new site on the upn.ru domain, the old one on the subdomain old.upn.ru.

3. Changes were made to the service file robots.txt for the domain upn.ru and the subdomain old.upn.ru. As a result, the old site was closed for search engines, and the new one was opened. The old site needs to be closed from indexing so that search engines do not downgrade the new one due to duplication of information on the old one.

4. Changed the structure of the site.

The old site had a simple structure. For example, apartments were divided into one-, two- and three-room. On the new site, it was important for us to provide filtering by districts, types of houses, completion of construction, etc. In general, to do SEO clustering at the stage of designing the structure of landing pages.

We implemented a filter and created a separate page for each filtering parameter.

Links to the main (parent) sections were implemented in the menu. Most of the pages were made sub-filtered. That is, as it should be in SEO clustering. Links to them with separate CHPU are available when selecting a specific filtering parameter.

Thanks to the coordinated work of our team and the customer, we achieved a good result:

1. We fully prepared the new site for the move, taking into account semantics and SEO clustering.

2. The contractor's programmers implemented most of our recommendations and those of Yandex and Google.

3. We organized the move within a few hours.

4. We avoided a drop in positions in the Top 10 and subsequently improved our positions.

5. Prevented a drop in traffic, including from search engines

As a result, visibility in Yandex and Google did not fall, but grew to 34%. Traffic from search jumped from 132 thousand to 188 thousand per month.

An ophthalmology website crookedly “moved” to Bitrix, and what came of it

In May 2021, the ophthalmology clinic's website “moved” to Bitrix. The company expected an increase in website traffic and conversions (as in the case with the Ural Chamber of Real Estate). But due to errors during the move, it received a drop in traffic and requests.

In June 2021, the company contacted us to analyze the reasons for the decline after moving to Bitrix. We conducted a site audit and found errors:

• The developers left the same metadata for most pages.

• A problem with addresses was discovered: pages with the same content were accessible at different URLs.

• Redirects from old addresses to new ones were not configured in Bitrix.

• There were no robots.txt and sitemap.xml indexing control files.

• There were technical duplicates of the site – the developers forgot to close them.

• The customer has 3 areas of work and 3 sites. These sites duplicate each other by 80%.

• We found usability issues. For example, there was no contact information in the header or footer.

The previous contractor did not do the basic things of moving from one platform to another. Without them, the move cannot be considered completed.

Masha Yusupova,
SEO Specialist Promo Expert

To return the sagging traffic, we found and fixed the site's errors: technical and usability. It wasn't without difficulties.

We had to fix other people's mistakes, it wasn't easy

The main surprise was the non-standard Bitrix.

The developer “strongly” improved the site administration system – it worked in a tricky way. In order to fix the errors faster, we contacted the developer, but he ignored our questions.

As a result, our programmers spent the first 2-3 months figuring out the site and “patching holes.” Not everything was solved. For example:

• It was not possible to set up automatic generation of unique meta tags. We entered the title and description values ​​manually.

• We removed duplicate pages in different sections of the site. But we worked mainly on eliminating the consequences of duplicates, not the cause. We spent 3 times more time than usual.

After 7 months of work we received the following results:

1. Improved the site's position in search engines. We took 100 queries into work. 95% of them were brought to the Yandex Top 10. That is, visibility in Yandex improved by 48%. In Google by 26%. And this is right after correcting the errors of the unsuccessful move!

2. Recovered and increased organic traffic. After our adjustments, traffic increased by 57%.

3. Increased website conversion. In addition to fixing the migration errors, the customer agreed on usability edits from our SEO specialists. As a result, the average conversion to the target action on the ophthalmology clinic website increased. For example, for the goal “view price list” from 3.48% to 23.3%.

But it would have been possible to prevent these problems from appearing from the start. Then the customer would have saved time, money and nerves on improvements. Then there would have been no drop in traffic and requests, and therefore there would have been no lost profit. The company's income would have been higher.

Why is it wrong to simply order a new, beautiful website from a web studio?

Ordering a new beautiful website from a web studio is also a solution. But there is a nuance. It is important who exactly will think about marketing your project. A standard web studio has on staff:

1. Project manager. His job is to make sure that the team works smoothly and does everything on time. And that you pay on time.

2. Designer. Its task is to make you beautiful. Consider yourself lucky if it is comfortable together with beautiful.

3. Programmer. His task is to correctly program everything that the designer has come up with.

Unfortunately, there are many examples when a person “brings” a brand new website for promotion, and we are forced to refuse.

We conduct an audit and see that there will be no sense, the site needs serious improvement. We give recommendations for improvement. But the customer has already invested in the development and is not ready for new expenses.

See a marketer in the list above? We don't – here's your answer…

We don't want to devalue the work of designers and programmers. No, these guys can be very competent and really cool.

But let's be honest, a website is a marketing tool. What are its tasks? Choose an option:

a) be beautiful and please the customer;

b) convert a visitor into a buyer.

Task A is solved by a web studio. Task B is solved by a marketer together with a developer.

In a web studio, in 9 out of 10 cases, a team without a marketer is working on your project. Therefore, unfortunately, after development, you will not even be able to make a claim about the fact that the site does not work, does not give applications from clients.

Project, the designer and programmer will reasonably answer that there was no marketing task

Typical mistakes and instructions for painless website relocation

The most common mistakes when moving that nullify the previous work of SEO specialists:

• Redirects from old pages to new ones are not configured;

• Content that previously attracted traffic has not been transferred;

• Meta tags and texts that are important for Yandex and Google are not posted.

Simple instructions for a safe website move:

1. Decide on a platform for the new site. It should be faster and more convenient.

2. Think over a new structure. Supplement it with SEO clustering if necessary.

3. Transfer all content. Page titles, photos, texts and images.

4. Prevent the website under development from being indexed prematurely.

5. Prepare a redirect map. The map will show which old page corresponds to which new one.

6. Implement a redirect map. And check with a scanner or parser that the map works.

7. Close the old site from indexing. This will help avoid duplicate content in search engines.

8. Open a new site for indexing.

Is it possible to kill two birds with one stone – avoid mistakes and get a beautiful and converting website?

Yes, you can. To do this, involve a marketer or SEO specialist at the development and migration stage.

Is it profitable to hire a marketer to support the development and migration of a website?

First, let's justify the need for moving with numbers. The numbers are conditional, but realistic, from our experience of communicating and working with clients.

So, your site is outdated – competitors with faster, more convenient and functional sites have appeared. You start to lose search traffic – the example assumes an annual decrease in traffic from 180,000 to 120,000. The site conversion drops from 5 to 3.5%.

After a year, due to a 34% drop in traffic and a 30% drop in conversion, you will receive:

• 60% decrease in revenue;

• increasing the share of advertising expenses by 2.5 times.

Further – more. If you do nothing, against the background of active competitors, your indicators will be worse.

Now let's consider the situation with a web studio that doesn't have a programmer. The studio has developed a beautiful website for you and you've moved. We see an increase in expenses – you paid 700,000 ₽ for development.

We assume that without a marketer and SEO specialist, traffic was lost and the site conversion rate decreased to 2% – these are intermediate figures, they are not shown in the figure.

You consulted with a marketer and, in order to restore the indicators, invested 600,000 ₽ in improvements.

Since there was a drop in traffic and losses in conversion during the move, we reduced these indicators:

• traffic from 180,000 to 150,000,

• conversion from 5 to 3.5% on average per year.

What's the bottom line:

• revenue fell almost 2 times, but it is more than it would have been without the development of a new website;

• The share of advertising expenses increased almost 5 times.

Compared to last year, the indicators have become worse. This is natural, you took into account the costs of developing and refining the site.

The costs have paid off, and in the next period the indicators will be beautiful again.

Now let's see what would have happened if a marketer had participated in the process. We allocated 200,000 ₽ for a marketer's consultation on website development and for moving support. The other indicators were kept at the same level.

As we can see, the costs have increased, but the revenue has remained the same. This is the only option without reducing revenue.

Due to the increase in costs, the share of advertising expenses increased, but to a lesser extent than in the previous example.

In the next period there will be no costs for website development and the share of advertising costs will be higher.

Resume

If your site is more than 10 years old, you have started to lose positions in search engines, visitors, applications are becoming less, it is time to update the site. And, perhaps, move to a new platform.

Updating a website and moving are often accompanied by a collapse in traffic and the nullification of previous SEO work. And this is a loss of money, time and nerves. As shown in the example above, revenue losses can reach up to 60% with a 34% drop in traffic and a 30% drop in conversion.

To avoid losses, we recommend engaging a marketer or SEO specialist to support the development and move. We recommend making the final decision after calculating the unit economics.

P.S.

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