SEO

How to Value Your Website’s Worth (Better Than a Calculator)

Published

2 years ago

July 14, 2022

If you’re considering selling your website, you need to know how much your website’s worth. While there are many website value calculators out there, most of them are inaccurate at best.

Website value calculators base their numbers purely on traffic and domain rating. To give you an idea of how inaccurate that is, a website that I’m in the process of selling for $500K was valued by one of these calculators at $14K.

Yikes!

Don’t worry—I’m going to teach you how to actually make an accurate analysis of how much your website could sell for.

If you have a website that doesn’t get any traffic or make any money, it’s probably not worth anything. But it may have value if you have a high-value domain name—but that’s an entirely different article.

If you do get traffic and/or have an income, that makes your website an online business. And there are a few different ways that websites (and online businesses) can be valued.

The value of your website comes down to three things:

The income you generate (and where that income comes from)
Your website’s traffic (and the quality of that traffic)
Additional added value (e.g., backlink profile, social media audience, or email list)

Let’s quickly break down each of these and how they affect your potential sale price.

Income multiple

The most common (and highest-paying) method of valuing a website is a direct multiple of your business’s net profit. Net profit is how much your business takes home after expenses.

At the time of this post, a typical website sells for between 30 times and 45 times of the monthly net profit. So if you earn $10K per month net profit, your website can likely sell for $300K to $450K.

Where your site falls in that range can depend on a lot of other factors, such as:

If you have multiple income streams – Websites that only have a single income stream (such as Google AdSense or Amazon Affiliates) sell for less than websites with multiple income streams (e.g., a mix of ads, affiliates, and physical or digital products).
How reliant you are on paid advertising – If your income relies on a complex structure of paid advertising that isn’t easy for a non-expert to run, that can lower the sale price.
If you have standard operating procedures (SOPs) – An SOP is a document that details exactly how to do tasks within your business, such as how you write, edit, and publish an article or how you build links. They make it easier for the new owner to take over, which could raise the sale price.

We will calculate your net profit (including subtracting add-backs, which I’ll explain) in the first step of the valuation. For now, let’s look at other ways to value your website and increase your monthly multiple.

Website traffic

The second-most-common way of valuing a website is by determining how much traffic the website gets. This is what most of those “online website worth” calculators use, and it’s kind of rubbish.

As I said in the intro, the website that I’m negotiating $500K for was valued at a meager $14K by those traffic value calculators.

Ahrefs estimates the monthly organic traffic value to be worth almost 10X that (at $130K) if we were to pay for it via search ads. So those calculators are poor judges of value.

Ahrefs' website traffic valuation metric in Ahrefs' Site Explorer

If I were selling the site based solely on the traffic and it wasn’t making much of an income, this would probably be a more accurate price.

But you can still use traffic to help in your valuation. At the very least, the quality of your traffic (not the raw quantity) can help you achieve a higher monthly multiple on your sale.

If you get most of your traffic from search engines, your website will be worth more than a website that gets most of its traffic from social media or paid advertising.

This is because organic traffic takes longer and is harder to acquire than paid traffic. It requires creating high-quality content and building links, among other things.

Other valuation factors

Beyond net profit and traffic, there are a few other things that can push up that income multiple. These include:

Your Domain Rating (DR) score and the quality of your backlinks.
Your email list and social media following.
Any other hard-to-duplicate factors.

Backlinks are extremely important for search engine optimization (SEO). And the higher the quality of links pointing to your site, the more it may be worth. The DR of your website is a score Ahrefs uses to gauge the strength of your backlink profile.

You can check your DR for free with our website authority checker.

However, simply looking at your DR is not enough—you have to dig deeper.

Where are your backlinks actually coming from? Are they from highly authoritative sites that are difficult to build links from, such as money.com or bankrate.com? Or did you use private blog networks (PBNs) and other low-quality link building tactics?

If it’s the former, that will raise your monthly multiple.

You can use the Referring domains report to see what backlinks you have and get a rough idea of the quality of those links. Just plug your site into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and click “Referring domains” on the left.

Referring domains report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Additionally, a strong email list or social media following with good engagement will be valuable to any potential buyer. Not just raw numbers; engagement is what really matters. It’s just too easy to pay a few bucks to artificially inflate your email or social media with low-quality bots.

Lastly, if your website has anything that’s unique and difficult to duplicate, that is often valuable to a buyer.

For example, I built an RV loan calculator tool for my website that cost thousands of dollars to have a developer build. This tool went on to rank for the keyword “RV loan calculator,” making it even more valuable.

Now that you know the factors that affect your website’s sale price, let’s actually come up with a number for you! Each of these steps will give you a value—but the more you follow, the more realistic your valuation will become.

Step 1. Create a financial spreadsheet

The very first thing you should do to calculate your website’s worth is create a spreadsheet, which includes your profit and loss, add-backs, and net profit.

Here’s an example of what that may look like:

You create a column for your revenue, then columns for each month. Do the same thing with your expenses. Revenue – Expenses = Net Profit.

Once you’ve listed your income and expenses, then you can create a section for add-backs (also called Discretionary Spending). These are expenses that the new owner won’t incur in the future or wouldn’t have incurred if they had owned the business.

For example, things like owner salaries, link building or content that created business growth, or web development.

Add-backs and discretionary spending calculator

With that done, calculate your net profit: Revenue – Expenses + Add-Backs = Net Profit.

Once you have the net profit for the last 12 months, simply add all of that together and divide by 12 to get your average monthly profit. Then take your average monthly profit and multiply it by 30 to 45 to get a range your website could sell for.

If that’s all you wanted—you’re done! But if you want to take it a step further and get a better idea of what you can realistically sell your website for, move on to step #2.

Recommendation

If your website doesn’t have any income and you purely want a valuation based on traffic, you can get a rough idea by using the traffic value metric in the Overview report from Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. It represents an estimated monthly cost of traffic from all keywords a site is ranking for if paid via PPC.

Overview report of Ahrefs' site in Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Step 2. Contact website valuation companies

There are online websites/business brokers who can help evaluate the value of your website and help you find a buyer, negotiate terms, and close the sale.

Places like Empire Flippers and Flippa are examples of such brokers.

They will evaluate your website’s worth for free. Just head to their site and fill out a form, and you’ll know your site’s worth within a week.

I recommend going through this process even if you don’t actually plan on using their brokerage services because it will give you a much better idea of what your website can realistically sell for in the current market. They do this for a living, so they’re pretty good at it.

When you sign up, you’ll get a Seller’s Dashboard with questions to answer and, eventually, offers for your site.

Once this part’s done, step #3 will help you get the best deal possible.

Step 3: Look for other interested parties to get the best deal

Working with brokers has a lot of perks: They can find the buyer for you, help negotiate the deal, and ensure a seamless transition into the new owner’s hands. They also provide legal help and make it so you don’t need to hire an attorney or worry about contracts and other complex things.

However, to provide these services, they take a hefty fee. In Empire Flipper’s case, it’s 8% of the sale price up to the first $700K as of this writing.

If you want to get a better deal and take more home when you sell, you should consider finding the buyer yourself and hiring an attorney to oversee the deal. In the end, if your site is big enough, this will end up saving you money.

That said, if you have a smaller site, it may not be worth the hassle to save a tiny amount.

But if your site is bigger, you can find buyers in a lot of ways. You can reach out to competitors directly to see if they’re interested in acquiring you, or you can look to other parties who can benefit from owning your site.

For example, if you own a site about automotive work, you can reach out to mechanics or companies that sell auto parts or bloggers who write about similar topics.

It will be a lot of extra work and manual outreach to find yourself a buyer. But if you want the best price, it’s the only way to get it.

Now you have an idea of what your website is worth and want to see that number get bigger. How do you do that? Obviously, you can do it by making more money. But beyond that, here are five ways to increase your sale price:

1. Diversify your income streams

Remember how I said websites with multiple income streams sell for more than those with a single income source? Well, if you only have one or two ways of making money, expanding that will help your multiple.

You can do that by:

Adding display ads to your site through a display network like Ezoic or AdThrive.
Branching out to other affiliates besides Amazon.
Creating and selling your own physical or digital product.

If you’re able to, I highly recommend working out affiliate partnerships directly with the companies you love to promote.

Amazon’s affiliate program is great and easy to use, but it only pays a few percent. If you work out your own partnerships, you can get anywhere from 5% all the way up to 30% or more. It pays to build relationships and do things others are too lazy to work on.

2. Negotiate higher rates with affiliates

If you already have partnerships with different affiliates, an easy way to increase your income is by negotiating a higher rate.

It’s extremely common for affiliates to give out a higher commission if you just ask—so long as you have an existing relationship with them and you’re actually sending them sales.

Send them a quick email like this:

Hey [Name],
I’ve been working with you for X months/years now, and we’ve sent $X in sales to you. It’s been wonderful working with you, and we love promoting your products!
If you are able to bump our commission up to X%, that will give us more funds to promote your products to a wider audience and create more content around your brand.
Can we talk about getting this rate increase?
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Thanks, [Your Name]

Lastly, don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and call them. It can often be easier to negotiate over the phone or on a video call. You can use the power of human connection, as you’re not just an email address on a computer screen.

3. Reduce costs

If you reduce your business’s costs, you can sell it for more money. Duh, right?

Some easy ways to reduce costs:

Canceling subscriptions you’re no longer using
Paying for tools annually instead of monthly to save
Review your finances and remove or reduce any unnecessary expenses

This one’s pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll leave it at that.

4. Diversify your traffic sources

Just like diversifying your income sources can increase your website’s value, having multiple traffic sources can offer the same result.

I already mentioned that organic traffic is more valuable than paid traffic. So you can start SEO efforts to get more organic traffic.

Besides that, you can also create and promote your brand on multiple social media channels. Start a TikTok account or a YouTube channel. Cross-post on Instagram and Facebook. Maybe even start a Facebook group and build a community.

These are all ways to increase your website’s traffic and, ultimately, how much you can sell it for.

5. Create standard operating procedures

SOPs not only make your business more valuable to buyers, but they also make it easier to run and hire people to do the tasks you’ve documented. This, in turn, makes it easier to scale up your business and make more money.

Essentially, an SOP is a document that outlines exactly how to do a specific task in your business step by step. They often include screenshots and even videos.

Here’s an example of one of my SOPs on finding and reaching out to influencers for content promotion:

It breaks down each step, explains the goal and process, and links to videos on how to specifically do each part of the process.

Here’s an excellent guide by Sweet Process that teaches you how to make SOPs.

So should you sell your website?

At this point, you should know how much your website is worth and how to increase that number.

If you’ve got this far, it probably means you have a profitable online business—something many people envy. Are you sure you want to sell it?

For me, I made the decision to sell one of my websites I’ve been working on for nearly a decade due to personal reasons, a need for capital, and (most importantly) burnout.

I was tired of working on it after all these years. It was an amazing business that mostly ran itself, but I was ready for a new chapter in my life.

If that’s you, maybe it’s time to sell.

Related Topics:Calculator seo websites Worth

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SEO

OpenAI To Show Content & Links In Response To Queries

Published

5 hours ago

May 1, 2024

Max

ChatGPT takes step toward becoming a search engine

OpenAI content deal will enhance ChatGPT with the ability to show real-time content with links in response to queries. OpenAI quietly took steps to gaining more search engine type functionality as part of a content licensing deal that may have positive implications for publishers and SEO.

Content Licensing Deal

OpenAI agreed to content licensing with the Financial Times, a global news organization with offices in London, New York, across continental Europe and Asia.

Content licensing deals between AI organizations and publishers are generally about getting access to high quality training data. The training data is then used by language models to learn connections between words and concepts. This deal goes far beyond that use.

ChatGPT Will Show Direct Quotes With Attribution

What makes this content licensing deal between The Financial Times and OpenAI is that there is a reference to giving attribution to content within ChatGPT.

The announced licensing deal explicitly mentions the use of the licensed content so that ChatGPT could directly quote it and provide links to the licensed content.

Further, the licensing deal is intended to help improve ChatGPT’s “usefulness”, which is vague and can mean many things, but it takes on a slightly different meaning when used in the context of attributed answers.

The Financial Times agreement states that the licensing deal is for use in ChatGPT when it provides “attributed content” which is content with an attribution, commonly a link to where the content appeared.

This is the part of the announcement that references attributed content:

“The Financial Times today announced a strategic partnership and licensing agreement with OpenAI, a leader in artificial intelligence research and deployment, to enhance ChatGPT with attributed content, help improve its models’ usefulness by incorporating FT journalism, and collaborate on developing new AI products and features for FT readers. “

And this is the part of the announcement that mentions ChatGPT offering users attributed quotes and links:

“Through the partnership, ChatGPT users will be able to see select attributed summaries, quotes and links to FT journalism in response to relevant queries.”

The Financial Times Group CEO was even more explicit about OpenAI’s intention to show content and links in ChatGPT:

“This is an important agreement in a number of respects,” said FT Group CEO John Ridding. “It recognises the value of our award-winning journalism and will give us early insights into how content is surfaced through AI. …this partnership will help keep us at the forefront of developments in how people access and use information.
OpenAI understands the importance of transparency, attribution, and compensation…”
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Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI directly referenced showing real-time news content in ChatGPT but more important he referenced OpenAI exploring new ways to show content to its user base.

Lastly, the COO stated that they embraced disruption, which means innovation that creates a new industry or paradigm, usually at the expense of an older one, like search engines.

Lightcap is quoted:

“We have always embraced new technologies and disruption, and we’ll continue to operate with both curiosity and vigilance as we navigate this next wave of change.”

Showing direct quotes of Financial Times content with links to that content is very similar to how search engines work. This is a big change to how ChatGPT works and could be a sign of where ChatGPT is going in the future, a functionality that incorporates online content with links to that content.

Something Else That Is Possibly Related

Someone on Twitter recently noticed a change that is related to “search” in relation to ChatGPT.

This change involves an SSL security certificate that was added for a subdomain of ChatGPT.com. ChatGPT.com is a domain name that was snapped up by someone to capitalize on the 2022 announcement of ChatGPT by OpenAI. OpenAI eventually acquired the domain and it’s been redirecting to ChatGPT.

The change that was noticed is to the subdomain: search.chatgpt.com.

This is a screenshot of the tweet:

Big News For SEO and Publishers

This is significant news for publishers and search marketers ChatGPT will become a source of valuable traffic if OpenAI takes ChatGPT in the direction of providing attributed summaries and direct quotes.

How Can Publishers Get Traffic From ChatGPT?

Questions remain about attributed quotes with links in response to relevant queries. Here are X unknowns about ChatGPT attributed links.

Does this mean that only licensed content will be shown and linked to in ChatGPT?
Will ChatGPT incorporate and use most web data without licensing deals in the same way that search engines do?
OpenAI may incorporate an Opt-In model where publishers can use a notation in Robots.txt or in meta data to opt-in to receiving traffic from ChatGPT.
Would you opt into receiving traffic from ChatGPT in exchange for allowing your content to be used for training?
How would SEOs and publisher’s equation on ChatGPT change if their competitors are all receiving traffic from ChatGPT?

Read the original announcement:

Financial Times announces strategic partnership with OpenAI

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Photo For Everything

SEO

Google’s John Mueller On Website Recovery After Core Updates

Published

1 day ago

April 30, 2024

Max

businessman financial professional look through binocular to see graph and chart.

John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, provided guidance this week regarding the path forward for websites impacted by recent search algorithm updates.

The discussion started on X (formerly Twitter) by SEO professional Thomas Jepsen.

Jepsen tagged Mueller, asking:

“Google has previously said Google doesn’t hold a grudge and sites will recover once issues have been solved. Is that still the case after HCU?”

Mueller’s response offered hope to site owners while being realistic about the challenges ahead.

Addressing Recovery Timelines

Mueller affirmed Google’s stance on not holding grudges, stating, “That’s still the case.”

However, he acknowledged the complexity of rankings, saying:

“…some things take much longer to be reassessed (sometimes months, at the moment), and some bigger effects require another update cycle.”

That’s still the case. That said, some things take much longer to be reassessed (sometimes months, at the moment), and some bigger effects require another update cycle. https://t.co/WDy7Q4dpzb has some more.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 29, 2024

Mueller pointed to a Google help document explaining the nuances. The document reads:

“Broad core updates tend to happen every few months. Content that was impacted in Search or Discover by one might not recover—assuming improvements have been made—until the next broad core update is released.

Do keep in mind that improvements made by site owners aren’t a guarantee of recovery, nor do pages have any static or guaranteed position in our search results. If there’s more deserving content, that will continue to rank well with our systems.”

The Comments Sparking Debate

Jepsen probed further, asking, “Is a core update what’s needed for HCU-affected sites to recover (assuming they’ve fixed their issues)?”

Mueller’s response highlighted how situations can differ:

“It depends on the situation… I realize there’s a big space between the situations, but generalizing doesn’t help. Sometimes it takes a lot of work on the site, a long time, and an update.”

It depends on the situation. https://t.co/F9s3Hli9t7 and https://t.co/pLdm29PjPD has some on that. I realize there’s a big space between the situations, but generalizing doesn’t help. Sometimes it takes a lot of work on the site, a long time, and an update.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 29, 2024
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The thread grew as user @selectgame raised concerns about Google Discover traffic, to which Mueller replied:

“Google Discover is affected by core updates as well as other parts of Search (and there are more policies that apply to Discover).”

Google Discover is affected by core updates as well as other parts of Search (and there are more policies that apply to Discover). If you’re seeing these changes when a core update rolled out, that might be what you’re seeing.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 29, 2024

Growing Frustrations

Prominent industry figure Lily Ray voiced mounting frustrations, stating,

“…many HCU-affected websites – which have been making all kinds of improvements over the last 7 months – have only seen further declines with the March Core Update.
I have seen some sites lose 90% or more of their SEO visibility since the HCU, with the last few weeks being the nail in the coffin, despite making significant improvements.”

Ray continued:

“And in my professional opinion, many of these sites did not deserve anywhere near that level of impact, especially the further declines over the past month.”

Mueller hasn’t responded to Ray’s tweet at this time.

John, any chance you can comment on the fact that many HCU-affected websites – which have been making all kinds of improvements over the last 7 months – have only seen further declines with the March Core Update?
I have seen some sites lose 90% or more of their SEO visibility… https://t.co/lvYRAScRQQ
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) April 29, 2024

Looking Ahead

As the search community awaits Google’s next moves, the path to recovery appears arduous for many impacted by recent algorithm reassessments of “Helpful Content.”

Site improvements don’t guarantee immediate recovery, so publishers face an uphill battle guided only by Google’s ambiguous public advice.

Why SEJ Cares

The March 2024 core update has proven disastrous for many websites, with severe traffic losses persisting even after sites try to improve low-quality content, address technical issues, and realign with Google’s guidelines.

Having clear, actionable guidance from Google on recovering from core update updates is invaluable.

As evidenced by the frustrations expressed, the current communications leave much to be desired regarding transparency and defining a straightforward recovery path.

How This Can Help You

While Mueller’s comments provide some insights, the key takeaways are:

Regaining previous rankings after an algorithm hit is possible if sufficient content/site quality improvements are made.
Recovery timelines can vary significantly and may require a future core algorithm update.
Even with enhancements, recovery isn’t guaranteed as rankings depend on the overall pool of competing content.

The path is undoubtedly challenging, but Mueller’s comments underscore that perseverance with substantial site improvements can eventually pay off.

FAQ

Can SEO professionals predict recovery time for a website hit by core updates?

SEO professionals can’t pinpoint when a site will recover after a core Google algorithm update.

Reasons for this include:

Google releases core updates every few months, so sites may need to wait for the next one.
It can take months for Google to reassess and adjust rankings.
How competitive the query is also impacts if and when a site recovers.

Does making site improvements after a core update ensure recovery in rankings and visibility?

After making improvements following a Google algorithm update, regaining your previous rankings isn’t guaranteed.

Reasons why include:

Your impacted content may not recover until the next core update, provided you’ve implemented enough site improvements.
Google’s search results are dynamic, and rankings can fluctuate based on the quality of competitor content.
There’s no fixed or guaranteed position in Google’s search results.

What is the relationship between Google Discover traffic and core search updates?

Google’s core algorithm updates that impact regular search results also affect Google Discover.

However, Google Discover has additional specific policies that determine what content appears there.

This means:

Improving your content and website quality can boost your visibility on Google Discover, just like regular searches.
You may see changes in your Discover traffic when Google rolls out core updates.
Your SEO and content strategy should account for potential impacts on regular searches and Google Discover.

Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock

SEO

5 Things To Consider Before A Site Migration

Published

2 days ago

April 29, 2024

Max

One of the scariest SEO tasks is a site migration because the stakes are so high and the pitfalls at every step . Here are five tips that will help keep a site migration on track to a successful outcome.

Site Migrations Are Not One Thing

Site Migrations are not one thing, they are actually different scenarios and the only thing they have in common is that there is always something that can go wrong.

Here are examples of some of the different kinds of site migrations:

Migration to a new template
Migrating to a new web host
Merging two different websites
Migrating to a new domain name
Migrating to a new site architecture
Migrating to a new content management system (CMS)
Migrating to a new WordPress site builder

There are many ways a site can change and more ways for those changes to result in a negative outcome.

The following is not a site migration checklist. It’s five suggestions for things to consider.

1. Prepare For Migration: Download Everything

Rule number one is to prepare for the site migration. One of my big concerns is that the old version of the website is properly documented.

These are some of the ways to document a website:

Download the database and save it in at least two places. I like to have a backup of the backup stored on a second device.
Download all the website files. Again, I prefer to save a backup of the backup stored on a second device.
Crawl the site, save the crawl and export it as a CSV or an XML site map. I prefer to have redundant backups just in case something goes wrong.

An important thing to remember about downloading files by FTP is that there are two formats for downloading files: ASCII and Binary.

Use ASCII for downloading files that contain code, like CSS, JS, PHP and HTML.
Use Binary for media like images, videos and zip files.

Fortunately, most modern FTP software have an automatic setting that should be able to distinguish between the two kinds of files. A sad thing that can happen is to download image files using the ASCII format which results in corrupted images.

So always check that your files are all properly downloaded and not in a corrupted state. Always consider downloading a copy for yourself if you have hired a third party to handle the migration or a client is doing it and they’re downloading files. That way if they fail with their download you’ll have an uncorrupted copy backed up.

The most important rule about backups: You can never have too many backups!

2. Crawl The Website

Do a complete crawl of the website. Create a backup of the crawl. Then create a backup of the backup and store it on a separate hard drive.

After the site migration, this crawl data can be used to generate a new list for crawling the old URLs to identify any URLs that are missing (404), are failing to redirect, or are redirecting to the wrong webpage. Screaming Frog also has a list mode that can crawl a list of URLs saved in different formats, including as an XML sitemap, and directly input into a text field. This is a way to crawl a specific batch of URLs as opposed to crawling a site from link to to link.

3. Tips For Migrating To A New Template

Website redesigns can be can be a major source of anguish when they go wrong. On paper, migrating a site to a new template should be a one-to-one change with minimal issues. In practice that’s not always the case. For one, no template can be used off the shelf, it has to be modified to conform to what’s needed, which can mean removing and/or altering the code.

Search marketing expert Nigel Mordaunt (LinkedIn), who recently sold his search marketing agency, has experience migrating over a hundred sites and has important considerations for migrating to a new WordPress template.

This is Nigel’s advice:

“Check that all images have the same URL, alt text and image titles, especially if you’re using new images.
Templates sometimes have hard-coded heading elements, especially in the footer and sidebars. Those should be styled with CSS, not with H tags. I had this problem with a template once where the ranks had moved unexpectedly, then found that the Contact Us and other navigation links were all marked up to H2. I think that was more of a problem a few years ago. But still, some themes have H tags hard coded in places that aren’t ideal.
Make sure that all URLs are the exact same, a common mistake. Also, if planning to change content then check that the staging environment has been noindexed then after the site goes live make sure that the newly uploaded live site no longer contains the noindex robots meta tag.
If changing content then be prepared the site to perhaps be re-evaluated by Google. Depending on the size of the site, even if the changes are positive it may take several weeks to be rewarded, and in some cases several months. The client needs to be informed of this before the migration.
Also, check that analytics and tracking codes have been inserted into the new site, review all image sizes to make sure there are no new images that are huge and haven’t been scaled down. You can easily check the image sizes and heading tags with a post-migration Screaming Frog crawl. I can’t imagine doing any kind of site migration without Screaming Frog.”
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4. Advice For Migrating To A New Web Host

Mark Barrera (LinkedIn), VP SEO, Newfold Digital (parent company of Bluehost), had this to say about crawling before a site migration in preparation for a migration to a new web host:

“Thoroughly crawl your existing site to identify any indexing or technical SEO issues prior to the move.
Maintain URL Structure (If Possible): Changing URL structures can confuse search engines and damage your link equity. If possible, keep your URLs the same.
301 Redirects: 301 Redirects are your friend. Search engines need to be informed that your old content now lives at a new address. Implementing 301 redirects from any old URLs to their new counterparts preserves link equity and avoids 404 errors for both users and search engine crawlers.
Performance Optimization: Ensure your new host provides a fast and reliable experience. Site speed is important for user experience.
Be sure to do a final walkthrough of your new site before doing your actual cutover. Visually double-check your homepage, any landing pages, and your most popular search hits. Review any checkout/cart flows, comment/review chains, images, and any outbound links to your other sites or your partners.
SSL Certificate: A critical but sometimes neglected aspect of hosting migrations is the SSL certificate setup. Ensuring that your new host supports and correctly implements your existing SSL certificate—or provides a new one without causing errors is vital. SSL/TLS not only secures your site but also impacts SEO. Any misconfiguration during migration can lead to warnings in browsers, which deter visitors and can temporarily impact rankings.
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Post migration, it’s crucial to benchmark server response times not just from one location, but regionally or globally, especially if your audience is international. Sometimes, a new hosting platform might show great performance in one area but lag in other parts of the world. Such discrepancies can affect page load times, influencing bounce rates and search rankings. “

5. Accept Limitations

Ethan Lazuk, SEO Strategist & Consultant, Ethan Lazuk Consulting, LLC, (LinkedIn, Twitter) offers an interesting perspective on site migrations on the point about anticipating client limitations imposed upon what you are able to do. It can be frustrating when a client pushes back on advice and it’s important to listen to their reasons for doing it.

I have consulted over Zoom with companies whose SEO departments had concerns about what an external SEO wanted to do. Seeking a third party confirmation about a site migration plan is a reasonable thing to do. So if the internal SEO department has concerns about the plan, it’s not a bad idea to have a trustworthy third party take a look at it.

Ethan shared his experience:

“The most memorable and challenging site migrations I’ve been a part of involved business decisions that I had no control over.
As SEOs, we can create a smart migration plan. We can follow pre- and post-launch checklists, but sometimes, there are legal restrictions or other business realities behind the scenes that we have to work around.
Not having access to a DNS, being restricted from using a brand’s name or certain content, having to use an intermediate domain, and having to work days, weeks, or months afterward to resolve any issues once the internal business situations have changed are just a few of the tricky migration issues I’ve encountered.
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The best way to handle these situations require working around client restrictions is to button up the SEO tasks you can control, set honest expectations for how the business issues could impact performance after the migration, and stay vigilant with monitoring post-launch data and using it to advocate for resources you need to finish the job.”

Different Ways To Migrate A Website

Site migrations are a pain and should be approached with caution. I’ve done many different kinds of migrations for myself and have assisted them with clients. I’m currently moving thousands of webpages from a folder to the root and it’s complicated by multiple redirects that have to be reconfigured, not looking forward to it. But migrations are sometimes unavoidable so it’s best to step up to it after careful consideration.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com