Source: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2015/05/27/3-keys-to-auditing-or-migrating-any-website/
Migrating to a new site can be a tedious task for both the site owner and developer. Always plan a good strategy to avoid screwing up your client’s website traffic.
Tips to migrate your website
Here are some helpful tips to help you migrate a site:
Reasons to migrate – it’s a must for web developers to know the priorities of their clients when moving to a new site. Site URL structure and redirection process needs to be strategically planned out since it could affect traffic and the entire business itself. The need to identify top performing pages and keywords to use are important as well since most of the content will revolve around the given keywords.
Site Audit – use screaming frog or other tools that can crawl your site that can generate a list of URLs. Sift through the entire list and see which pages have duplicates and are subjected to content update, deletion or redirects.
Benchmarking – when selecting a benchmark, you should first identify your goals. Do you want to improve on the speed of your site? Do you want to update your key pages to increase conversions? These are some questions that the site owners need to understand to carefully plan benchmarks, collect the right information and work on improvements.
Reporting – after migration, you need to monitor the performance of the site by using a data capturing tool. Google analytics contains reports that include visits, average time on page, bounce rate and other metrics that are important to a sites performance. Gather data before migration and compare this with the data you get after migration to see if you traffic has changed after launching the new site.