What are some best practices for moving to a new CMS?

Here is a fun question from Mani in Delhi. Mani asks, “We are changing a fairly large HTML site to CMS. What are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not lose our search rankings?”

Very good question! I have seen a lot of people a lot of websites go through a 2 year re-design only to launch with completely new software underlined package, platformed CMS or anything and a completely new HTML layout and suddenly are not what they were expecting to be and then they are stuck. Was it because we changed the layout or was it because we changed the CMS or we changed the URL structure. So one big piece of advice that I would like to give is, try not to launch all of this at once. For example if your CMS means your layout has to change you can mark that up. You can try to make it, if you change your HTML, so that it looks like to look like from your content management system and then make sure that your rankings don’t change. They shouldn’t change very much at all but if you change the whole bunch of stuff on your page that can affect how Google scores that page. So instead of changing the CMS and changing the layout, see if you can change only one at a time. Try not to change the URL structure. Another thing is if you are really worried you can change only one directory that is powered by the CMS at first. So it is something like dipping your food in the water. But it’s just like any other scientific thing, if you are going to change 4 things at once and then your rankings change you don’t know which of the 4 things it was. So if at all possible no. 1 try to change it so that everything from your CMS generates identical HTML and then no. 2 if you are going to go through a big re-design try to put some mark-ups relatively early may be you can do some ab testings, see how it goes with users, see how it goes in terms of search engine rankings. But don’t try to work for 2years without even trying it out on the search engines just to see how it might be scored differently. That said normally if you are changing things around it isn’t a huge difference, it doesn’t make a huge impact, it is possible so do some trials if you can but it ism should be very doable to try to migrate between different content management systems without losing your rankings.

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