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TL/DR
SysEng team have changed site from www. To non www. I am petrified I have missed something important and would like someone to check my list.
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I have read horror stories about site transfers going wrong. Due to some issues our site was suddenly on the go slow, pages were taking a minute to load etc and suddenly this landed on me.
Our SysEng team did a variety of things to get the site speed up but in the end and for reasons I’m not entirely sure on it was decided to switch over to the non www URL.
I think it was along the lines of the non www. was hooked into GCP and so worked without any delay, but the www. version went to and external server (which has been temperamental of late), then through to GCP.
So the site is now live and is in effect the same site exactly (minus www) but most importantly is lightening quick.
Since it’s been live
I have
- Checked pages and internal links and nothing seems different, if anything better
- Checked the sites canonical tags are pointing to the right url (non www.)
- Setup new properties for GA4, GSC and other external platforms we use to measure/track (Clarity, SEMRUSH etc)
- Checked for broken links using SEMRUSH
- Recrawled the site using Screaming Frog and generated a new sitemap for all non www URLs
- Uploaded sitemap to GSC and I guess as a potential helping hand asked GSC to reindex key pages on the site
- Changed all incoming links that I have access to the best I can (Trustpilot) and requested external links to be changed over asap.
- For things like PPC / GMC the links work because of the redirect but for good housekeeping I will change these over today.
But my main concern was SEO and have I missed something obvious?
Thank you
Thank you guys, I appreciate the input and it's a weight off my shoulders for sure. The only thing I am battling now is my impatience and wishing Google would index more pages quicker.
Thank you once again
Ryan
Hi @Ryan Webb ! Check out this Google Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EbO3nilXXJ4kcnReTz-05f4PRKup33EVJdCJ23Ei-8Y/edit#gid=0 with an SEO validation checklist I've created to ensure you don't leave anything out before/during/after the Web migration. You can see more resources I've created for it here too.
I hope they're useful :)
Hey Ryan,
It looks like you have covered most aspects there. I usually find the old www URLs using a crawling tool, as Pedro says, there will usually be a few left in the less obvious places such as the schema or asset paths. I'd be making such all 301 redirects are working and not going to the parent directories. In terms of reporting back to the business, Sistrix does some very aesthetically pleasing graphs for these types of migrations - see the one below for vodafone.co.uk
Make sure they keep those redirects in place permanently and do a quick check quarterly on any www URLs that start popping up - this often happens due to teams assuming the www URL. You have to keep squashing these periodically, especially on enterprise sites.
Hi Ryan,
Seems you're on the right track. It's usually fine to change URLs at the hostname level. It tends to have less things going wrong than changing URL paths.
One thing I'd keep an eye on would be loading speed, albeit it being mosly a nice-to-have, as it's not something you should lose sleep over—Naked domains have the downside of not being able to act cookieless, because all the cookies now are set at the naked domain level (instead of hostnames), even the cookies you wouldn't need for a specific site section/hostname.
Also, don't forget to check less obvious things, like image paths and structured data markup (if you have it).
Beyond that, there isn't much to worry, except keeping an eye on it during the inital months.