Did you know that a new site that runs on a more efficient CMS (Content Management System) can help your site’s optimization. Be considerate of what data, content, and variables change during the process though, as you could lose a lot of hard work to-date.
- Make sure to develop your new site in a test location. This location should not be on your current domain, but some unrelated domain or IP. It should also be blocked by an htaccess password and have a robots.txt file added to restrict search engines from indexing it and creating a duplicate content issue.
- Update your Title Tags and meta data before going live too.
- Run a sitemap on the old and new site so you can do a 1-for-1 match on any url changes so you don’t cause 404’s or site errors.
- Ensure that the new CMS has search engine friendly url options.
- Confirm that the CMS can dynamically create Title Tags, but that you are also able to manually overwrite them as needed.
- Does this new site have the ability to automatically update and generate a sitemap, or will you have to manually run a sitemap any time you add/update content?