Website Migrations & Rapid301

From an SEO and lead generation perspective, the single most important thing to do during a site rebuild is ensure that rankings are retained and that traffic continues to flow.

Here's a quick video to show you the entire workflow:‍

While all 301-redirects are done at the server level, there are different types. Please read on for information on domain wide redirects (http -> https etc) and page specific redirects.

If you are migrating to Webflow from another CMS, checkout this guide.

Types of 301-Redirects

Domain Wide Redirects ensure that only one version of your site is indexed. The best practice is to use the https://www.example.com version of your site, which becomes your canonical url.

• http -> https.
• non-www. -> www.

Domain Wide redirects take incoming requests from any variation of the URL and ensure it resolves to the https://www.example.com version. These are simple to setup without Rapid301. More info at this article.

Page Specific Redirects ensure that pages/urls that do not exist anymore don't result in user landing on a broken page (404), such as the following cases:

• /about-us -> /about
• /project/deleted-project -> /project

If you delete a page or rebuild a site and change the structure drastically, setting up page specific redirects will ensure traffic continues to flow to the most relevant pages. Rapid301 makes this easy.

When To Use Page Specific 301-Redirects?

The TL:DR is that all pages driving traffic to your current site need to be rebuilt your new site, so that users land on a page with relevant content.

They are part of a broader SEO Site Migration Strategy that is designed to preserve your SEO rankings and keep your 'link juice' flowing.

We strongly recommend that you rebuild any pages that;

• have backlinks (from affiliates, blogs, social media etc)
• are ranking well (on Google, Bing etc)
• have been shared (by affiliates or partners)
• have printed media (QR codes, paths)

Not to scare you, but getting the migration right can mean the difference between the site flourishing or losing all it's traffic, as outlined in the below screenshot. So how to prevent this?

The Best Practice For New Site Structure

The best thing to do when rebuilding a site is keep the URL structure the exact same for as many pages as possible, or as close to the original structure possible.

Here are the URL strategies ranked from best to worst:

1. Keep the URL the same - no redirect is needed.
2. If the page is similar but the URL has changed, create a 301-redirect
   Example: /contact-us -> /contact
3. Any CMS driven pages that have been removed should be redirected to the most relevant new page, or nearest index. Example: /blog/blog-is-removed -> /blog
4. Any pages that have no relevant path should be redirected to the home page (this should be used sparingly).
   Example: /this-will-not-exist-anymore -> /

If you don't rebuild these pages and do not setup a 301-redirect, users will land on a 404 page you are going to lose leads and damage your domain.

Here are what 301-redirect documents look like. They look boring and like they take a long time to create, right? Don't worry, we'll show you how to get it done super fast!

How To Create 301-Redirect Documents

Path-to-path 301 redirect's are typically handled in one of two ways; as a .csv or .htaccess files. Both file types show which NEW URL needs to be routed to which OLD URL.

Thankfully, all your favourite website builders enable you to bulk import 301-redirects, often as .csvs (.htaccess files are seen less often).

The steps to creating these 301-redirect documents are:

1. Get the sitemap from the old & new websites.
2. Clean sitemaps, remove duplicates, error pages on the staging site.
3. Match the most relevant URL on the new site to the respective URL on the old site.
4. Remove the base URL so it is is only the PATHs, not full URLs (if the domain is the same)

It's time consuming to do this process manually, but we have a modern workflow that gets it done in a fraction of the time.

Fastest Way To Create 301-Redirects

You guessed it, the fastest way is to use Rapid301. After doing lots of rebuilds, we built it to automate this manual process.

Simply enter your CURRENT WEBSITE URL and STAGING WEBSITE URL and Rapid301 will scan your sites and automatically match up the most relevant paths.

You can then review the output in the 301 redirect super table to ensure the best paths have been redirected, and to