Importance of Pointing To New Pages If Upgrading To New Site

One of the most bitter lessons anyone who owns a website or blog can learn is to lose visitors when upgrading to a new site or domain.

If proper planning is not done within the first week, the drop in visitors can get quite bad. In fact, within hours of moving, site visits can go down as much as 95 per cent, and may never pick up to more than 25 per cent over the next seven days as search engines try to index your site. This experience was shared by a fellow website owner recently - despite my having cautioned him not to ignore the need to point to the new site, he did just that. Lucky for him, his website was small, about 300 pages in total. But because it was a company website dealing with travel products, his statistics suffered.

I am writing about this - although I cannot reveal the site owner's domain for professional courtesy - to perhaps give you some tips how to avoid the same mistake.

1. Before moving to a new site, after having transferred your old content to the new server, make sure you have clearly and accurately point the relevant pages to the corresponding ones at the new site. If the content is similar, I propose you delete all the old content on that old page and insert a courtesy note and the hyperlink. You may do this manually or using a software. Generally, software redirects after the visitors encounter an error page and this pointing is done server-wide. I find doing it manually better since you point individually to the new corresponding page.
2. At the new page, put a note to get your visitors to renew his bookmark to overide the old. Most people forget this and a reminder will be good.
3. Get the search engine to re-index your site and have a sitemap inserted in your server. Overide the old sidemap as well.
4. Dont forget to have to have a ROBOTS.TXT file inserted at the old server pages instructing bots not to index them. Better, in each old page, have a NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW snippet inserted.
5. How long should you keep your old pages in the server? Well, have a look at your server logs and see if a majority of your new traffic comes from the new site URLs. If it is, say 90 per cent, then you can safely delete the older files. This can be any where from 1 week to a month. My friend was lucky, he did his in matter of 8 days.
6. Be polite and personal when writing redirection instructions. You can be witty, but be personal. Standard Error Page redirections are cold because they are automated. You can change all that message to suit your needs - just as the webmaster or host how to change the Error 404 message. Again as in my friend, he requested visitors to his old pages to please click on the new link. In a few short lines, he told them why he had to move, and asked for their cooperation to bookmark and was even brave enough to have a share button on the new site. Within matter of 8 days, not only had the site recovered, his traffic grew beyond what was recorded at the old site. (At the moment of writing, he has gained back the dip but still wondered if he should leave the old pages intact - and I advised him to leave it for another 8 days).
7. Once the new site is up, if the domain had been changed, make sure all your physically attached marketing tools reflect the same. This include domain names on your office stationery and advertisements.

If you have done the above well, there should not be any reason why your traffic will drop even after you moved sites. As a site owner, it is important you learnt to read server logs and site meter reports.