Do you know what’s inside a golf ball? 

Nine-year-old me was determined to find out. I roped in my best friend and together we raided my Dad’s stash of golf balls.  

We loaded them up into a vice on the garage workbench and started cutting them open with a big, dangerous cutting blade. 

(It was the 80s and health and safety hadn’t been invented yet.)

The first golf ball was full of rubber bands wrapped around a squishy ball. It was a thrilling discovery.  

What would be inside the next one? Turned out to be solid rubber foam. Not quite so exciting but by now we were on a roll! 

Every ball was different inside and it was addictive. Before we knew it, we’d hacked open 19 brand new golf balls. 

As we surveyed the wreckage of our experiment, surrounded by chips of white plastic and metres of rubber string, we suddenly knew we’d be in deep, deep trouble. 

Brainwave. We’d just glue them back together and no one would notice.

Just like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where broken bowls are repaired with gold to make them more valuable, our mended golf balls would perform even better, we reasoned. 

My Dad would love them. 

(By the way, nine-year-old me didn’t know anything about ancient Japanese ceramic arts. I wasn’t a total nerd.)

We cunningly hid the evidence, er, at the bottom of our driveway, where it was instantly found by my mum.

Spoiler alert. My Dad did not love those golf balls. Not even a little bit. He was furious. I was grounded forever.  

Here’s the golf-ball shaped lesson. 

When you migrate or redesign your website, you’re effectively taking it apart and putting it back together again, especially if you’re doing a big re-design.  

If you do things in the wrong order, miss certain steps or mislay certain key pieces of information, the speed and SEO performance of your shiny new website might take a hit, which is no bueno.

I don’t want to scare you away from building your own website. Far from it! I want you to go forth and rebuild with confidence. 

The good news is that there is a simple plan you can follow and I’m sharing it with you in this post.

When you’re thinking about safely re-designing your website, ie. not tanking your SEO, or losing any files, the work actually begins before you begin your redesign. 

For the purposes of this blog post, by the way, I’m going to assume that you’re re-designing on a fresh install of WordPress and not just making over your live website.

(If you’re not sure which re-design method you want to go for, then you should read this blog post first.)

Once you’ve finished your re-design, you’re effectively going to be swapping your new site for your old site, so there are a few key data sources and files you’re going to want to keep (your media library, blog posts, SEO settings and some plugin contents).

Before The Build

At this stage, you’re planning ahead to save future you a lot of painful copying and pasting. 

One common mistake I often see is forgetting to export any SEO data from the live site into the dev site, then after the new site goes live, realising that you need to recover it from a back-up and then having to painfully copy and paste it into the new site. I’ve been caught out before and it sucks. 

1. In your dev site, install your SEO plugin of choice and import the settings from the live site into the dev site. 

2. Export all of the pages into your dev site, which will also import any SEO meta data and descriptions.

3. Export all of your blog posts and featured images into the dev site, ready to be re-styled. 

4. Install any plugins that may need styling and export any relevant plugin contents to save you re-building them. Eg. forms, WooCommerce products, custom fields.

Before Migration

Hooray! You’ve finished re-designing your website and you can wait to show it off!

I’ve talked about backing up your website many, many times before but when you’re about to go live, it’s time to do the mother of all backups.

1. Create a folder on your computer where you can store everything during migration.

2. Backup and (crucially) download a backup of your whole website. But don’t just leave it there. Open up your backup and check that you can easily find and access your uploads folder (Media Library) and all of the images inside. And make sure you know how to actually do a restore – not just in theory.

3. Export your SEO settings. If you have substantially changed the structure of your site, you may have some copy and pasting to do. There are plugins available which allow you to do a detailed export so that you have the page and blog post SEO meta in a spreadsheet. Yoast SEO offers this feature natively.

4. Export any settings from plugins you intend to keep. Forms, for example, are easy to export rather than having to build from scratch.

5. Make a note of any ‘hidden’ code. For example, if you’ve ever added a code snippet to your functions file (or had a developer do it), just take a copy, because you never know when you’re going to need it.

6. Make a note of any social media verification snippets, Facebook pixels or Google Analytics tracking code from your theme settings areas.

Migration

Pushing the go live button on your website is scary. I mean, we’re all human and it’s easy to forget something. But there are some key things you can do to take away the fear factor.

1. Make sure you can access your hosting either through the File Manager in your hosting control panel or through an FTP client like FileZilla. This can be really useful when you want to check if your image files, for example, have migrated properly. Or you need to troubleshoot core WordPress files like your htaccess or wp-config.

2. Inside your hosting, place all of your current (ie. old) site files into a folder so that you can install a fresh copy of WordPress and activate the SSL certificate on the new install (look for the green padlock). This will save you bulk updating your urls and file paths later.

3. Use a migration tool that does all of the heavy lifting for you. I use BlogVault for everything, but if you don’t have that, the same team makes an excellent migration plugin, called Migrate Guru. All you’ll need are your hosting FTP details. The plugin does all the work by migrating everything onto a fresh installation of WordPress.

4. Once migrated, using FTP or a file manager, re-upload your media library files into the new uploads folder.
   
   Check, check and check again, particularly when it comes to your media library.
   
   Go back to your oldest blog post, check all of the images are still showing correctly and inspect the media url to make sure that your image file paths have been updated during the migration. If they haven’t, you may need to use a plugin, like Velvet Blues, to update your urls.

After Migration

Once your shiny new site is live, it’s easy to get carried away and forget to dot this ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s. Checking images, restoring plugin data and security and back-up are probably the most important steps to get right and will save you hours of pain in the future. 

Pushing the go live button on your website is scary. I mean, we’re all human and it’s easy to forget something. But there are some key things you can do to take away the fear factor.

1. Check your image links. Check again!

2. Google is looking for continuity, so make sure you re-upload your SEO settings and / or copy and paste your SEO meta data for each page.

3. Import any plugin data if you didn’t do that earlier.

4. If you’ve gotten rid of some page or altered URLs use a plugin like Redirection to create 301 redirects, which will let Google know that the page has permanently moved and send any existing SEO juice to the new page url.

5. Hook back up to Google Analytics & reinstall and test your Facebook pixel

6. Head over to Google Search Console to submit your new sitemap and keep an eye on it for a couple of weeks to acknowledge any 404 notifications. Google just wants to know that a real person is managing the website.

SAFETY & SECURITY

1. Re-test your backup system

2. Install a security plugin like WordFence and follow the set-up wizard.

3. I would also recommend adding another level of security to either hide the wp-admin login url, limit login attempts and / or add a two-factor authentication plugin like Google Authenticator. You can also do this using the pro version of Wordfence.

4. Install a comment spam plugin to limit blog post comment spam. I like CleanTalk (paid) and Anti-Spam Bee (free). You can also limit comments in the Settings > Discussion area.

5. Make sure your contact form has a form log, which means you can see form entries stored in the back up, which is vital if your email fails. For example, the native Divi form doesn’t come with a form log, but there is an inexpensive plugin you can purchase that creates one for you.

Whew! That’s it. My exhaustive migration process that I use for every single client site.

Good luck with your redesign. Remember, if you’re fully backed up and you know how to use your backup system, then nothing can really go wrong.

If you’d like this guide in checklist form, you can download it right here.