I'm analysing your website...
XXX pages found!
Look at the full results to gain key insights into this website rebuild or migration project.
Website Migration Analyser
Rebuilding an existing website? Enter it's URL to understand it's structure and sitemaps, so you can properly quote your rebuild and migration project.
Website Migration & Site Rebuild Analyser
Client: Can you rebuild my website?
You: Sure, it'll be easy!
Almost every freelancer/agency we know has worked on what they thought would be an easy project that turned into a unprofitable nightmare.
This has often due to a lack of analysis at the beginning of the project - no one analysed the old site structure and saw the huge amount of legacy content that would need to be migrated across to preserve SEO rankings, or factored in the time it took to setup 301-redirects.
The key takeaway here is that before accepting a project, one must understand the old site structure, including;
- The number of pages.
- The number of collections.
- The number of locales.
- A list of the URLs.
With this information, you will be able to do three things;
- Identify the new site structure
- Understand how much time/effort is required to migrate content across
- Factor in time/tooling costs for website migration into the project quote.
If you are about to do a website rebuild/migration and want to plan each step, download this FREE checklist!
Quoting Your Website Rebuild Project
Here is a typical list of tasks for a rebuild project;
- Website Design
- Website Development
- Content migration
- 301-redirect mapping
When quoting a rebuild project, you need to factor the time and cost for all of these tasks - and agree on the person/entity responsible for completing them.
The design and development are typically done by the freelancer/web agency - if this is you you are likely quoting on these two things already.
During initial negotiations, it's strongly advised that you align with you client on who will do the content-migration and 301-redirect mapping as it can be either of you.
We suggest offering the migration and mapping as a paid service (that is in addition to the design/build) while offering the client the option to do it themselves.
The reason for this is that the migration can take substantial time. The 301-redirect mapping will also take substantial time if you do it manually.
Once all this is agreed the project quote and scope is formalised, and you can move forward with proper time and costings for your project.
Planning, Design & Build
With the original site structure in hand you will have a good understanding of the key pages you will need to build, how to setup the CMS and any locales you might need to add.
Ensure these are accounted for in your designs including static page, CMS driven or dynamic pages and page templates.
For the full strategy on doing a site-migration, read this Wordpress -> Webflow (the same principles apply for all web builders and CMS's)
If you have a multi-lingual site, this article is a useful resource.
Remember to keep the URLs the same when possible or similar if they cannot be exact matches!
Content Migration
Once you have designed and built the website - and configured the CMS and locales if applicable - it is time to migrate the content across.
If you have included this in the project timeline and budget, the hours spent doing this will be paid. If your client is doing this, it's a good idea to train them and send them a video that they can reference so they can map all of the content.
At the end of this phase all the URLs on your new site should be published on the staging domain.
Preparing For Launch
Once all the content is migrated across, it's time to map 301-redirects to keep SEO rankings intact and ensure all your old links that may have broken during the migration, resolve to new pages.
This can be done manually but after doing lots of rebuilds, we built Rapid301 to automate this manual process.
Simply enter your URLs into the Rapid301 Site Scan to 301-redirects tool or upload your complete sitemaps from screaming frog or equivalent to the Sitemap to 301-redirects tools.
Review the 301-redirects and make any updates before exporting them!
Conclusion
When rebuilding a website, it's very important to understand the old site structure; number of pages, collections and locales.
Factoring the time and costs associated with performing the content migration and mapping 301-redirects is critical in ensuring a project is launched on-time and on-budget.
If you need any help with a migration, please don't hesitate to get in touch!
As a web agency owner with 15+ site rebuilds and migrations under his belt, Luke helps web development and SEO agencies improve their migration workflows through automation. Rapid301 was used internally and then opened up to the world when others asked about the idea.
FAQs
Can't find the answer you are looking for?
Rapid301 uses a series of workflows and matching algorithms to compare every URL on the staging to site with each URL on the current site. This gives you the foundational redirect document. You can check the output in the powerful 301-Redirect Table to make any adjustments before exporting your redirects as a .csv or .htaccess file.
Yes! If you use Screaming Frog or have sitemaps in a .csv file, you can upload them and have Rapid301 process these. Use this CSV -> 301 Redirect tool.
You can simply input your Current Site Url and Staging Site Url into Rapid301 and it will crawl both sites to get the sitemap, then automatically process them. Or if you have used a tool like Screaming Frog to get the sitemaps, you can upload them directly using this CSV -> 301 Redirect tool.
When you scan your site with Rapid301 it first gets your URLs from all of your sitemaps (from sitemap.xml and other nested sitemaps) and then does a HTTP crawl of your website. This is fast and efficient and suitable for most websites.
Rapid301 uses a blend of crawling methods based around HTTP but it currently does not find links injected via Javascript in Single Page Applications (SPAs) or otherwise. If you need this Javascript scraping we advise using Screaming Frog to crawl your sites. You can then upload the sitemaps from Screaming Frog to Rapid301's CSV -> 301 Redirect tool to automatically process them.
Rapid301's matching algorithm is very accurate when the paths are similar and it easily identifies the best match path. If the path structure has changed significantly or if there are no similar URLs, it will redirect to the parent route or index, meaning that it will still be handled. You will see paths with no great match by the blue indicator on the project review page.
Rapid301 does a great job in 90%+ cases, but there are some situations in which it can give outputs you wouldn't expect. It is strongly recommended that you check all the rows and make adjustments before exporting the redirects to make sure everything is in order.
No, Rapid301 checks all the status codes all the URLs on the staging site for both tools and excludes any that return a 404. This means that if you use the URL -> 301-Redirect or the CSV -> 301-Redirect meaning no staging paths will resolve to a 404 error page.
Rapid301 supports both username and password for sites that have HTTP authentication. You can either enter the username and password or temporarily disable it while running the scan. If your site has a password field on the page, and not HTTP, we recommend disabling the password protection for best results.
Yes, Rapid301 URL -> 301 redirect tool redirects all pages found on the current site, regardless of the status code. This means 200, 404 will be redirected.
Rapid301 is free for sites up to 10 pages and then charges a fixed rate per project for various page ranges from there. For a full price list, please visit our pricing page.
Rapid301 is completely free to use to create 301-redirect documents for any site. For sites over 50 pages, you will need to create an account. You can edit the 301-redirects in the editor and you only pay when you need to export them. If you are not satisfied with the results we are happy to offer a refund. There is no subscription service so there is no need for a free trial.
Creating 301-redirects manually is extremely time consuming and boring. I did it once for a 350 page and that was enough motivation for me to spend 1000's of hours building Rapid301 so no one has to suffer the pain and frustration again.
