133: Is a New Website Really the Answer? Protecting Your SEO Before You Change Anything

In this episode, Jules White gets candid about a situation she sees far too often - a client whose website traffic disappeared off a cliff after paying a professional to migrate her site to a new platform. Jules breaks down exactly why this happens, what should have been done differently, and how you can protect yourself if you're considering any kind of change to your website.

Jules explains why most websites don't actually need to move platforms at all, and why the desire for a fresh new look can lead to throwing away something far more valuable - the SEO authority your site has already built up with Google.

Key Takeaways:

• The Real Cost of a Bad Migration: Why traffic drops often don't appear until three months after a migration, and why that delay makes the damage even harder to undo.
• Check Before You Change: Why looking at your Google Search Console data before making any website decisions is essential, even if you think you're not getting much traffic.
• The WWW Problem Nobody Warns You About: How the difference between your www and non-www website versions can cause Google to treat your site as a completely different website - and what to do about it.
• What "SEO Friendly" Actually Means: Jules sets the record straight on what website builders should be delivering as standard, from heading hierarchy to page speed to site structure.
• When Moving Platforms Is (and Isn't) the Right Call: The specific situations where migrating genuinely makes sense, and how to plan it properly so you don't lose your existing traffic.

If you're thinking about a new website, rebranding, or changing platforms, this episode could save you months of lost leads - listen before you make any decisions!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 10: Website Migration Mistakes That Can Sabotage Your SEO
• Episode 73: Choosing the Right Website Platform
• Explore Jules' services including website migration plans and SEO action plans

Transcript

Introduction: The Website Migration Problem

Jules White: Hi, welcome back to the Website Success Show. It is Jules here, and today I want to talk about something that has come up multiple times over the years as I've been working with clients.

I had a new client last week who was in an unfortunate situation that she had migrated her website to a new platform and—oh, I say she had migrated her website.

She'd actually paid somebody to migrate her website over to a new platform. And her traffic had dropped off a cliff.

Literally disappeared; she went from having traffic bringing clients into her business to that just disappearing.

And it makes me really mad when this happens because there are so many things that can prevent this from happening, and there are so many decisions that need to happen along the way.

If you're thinking about any kind of website migration or thinking about changing platform providers, changing domain names, changing your whole website, and rewriting all of your copy, there are so many things which with just a little consideration before you make that decision, can make such a big difference.

So as I say, I've had this situation come up a lot. I've worked with a lot of clients who have come to me after they've had this kind of drop-off from migrating their website.

Depending on how long ago the website had been migrated depends on how quickly you can recover some of that traffic and whether you can recover some of the traffic.

With this particular client, the website migration had happened in January, and this is what often happens, especially with smaller websites where Google's not crawling through them every single day.

It takes a few months before Google realises that pages have disappeared, that links are broken, and that the content has changed on your website, and then you have that drop-off in traffic.

So normally, it's around three months that we start seeing this difference, this change come up in websites.

So with this particular client—and this is the most frustrating part about this—they didn't really need to move their website.

They'd been advised by a professional that they should move their website; this professional they'd gone to help them with other things in their business, with setting up a CRM and those kind of things.

And they'd been advised to move their website into the same platform. They were moving them over into GoHighLevel, which that in itself doesn't have to be a problem.

But there are certainly things that we need to consider, and especially like in this case where this client had a WordPress website.

Why Most Websites Don't Need to Move

Jules White: Now when I'm working with clients, I don't recommend WordPress anymore.

Back in episode 73, I talked about choosing the right website platform and why I love FEA Create, which is a GoHighLevel white label.

Now, I used to build websites in WordPress when I first started building websites, and I would often find that clients just got really overwhelmed with it.

There's so much in terms of keeping up to date with plugins and learning the platform.

And there is, with any platform, even if you're using something like FEA Create, there is definitely a learning curve, but I just find clients get to grips with it a bit easier.

But, and this is a big but, if a client already has a WordPress website that's working well in their business, I probably would say that it's not worth migrating it.

Unless it's a very small website and they've got a good budget to actually make sure that migration is handled properly, then often we can end up with these kind of situations where the migration is not handled properly and everything disappears.

The Dangers of Hiring the Wrong Professional

Jules White: And unfortunately in the online world, there are lots of people out there who build websites, but they don't necessarily build them with the right structure, with thinking about URLs and redirecting things.

So we don't end up with all these broken links.

I was talking at the local NatWest accelerator I'm in; I was talking to a web developer there who builds WordPress websites.

And we were talking about some of the things that he does as standard when he builds websites, and his things like page hierarchy, making sure that the headings are set up properly on a website, adding schema markup, like structured data that helps bots to crawl through the websites properly and actually understand what's going on with them.

And he was talking—we were talking about SEO—and he was saying about the fact that he doesn't do anything around SEO, and I had to point out to him that actually building websites properly for the foundations of SEO is not a given nowadays.

So this is something that is worth bearing in mind, even if somebody's got recommendations.

It doesn't necessarily mean that they've actually created a site that can be crawlable by the bots, that the bots understand it, that's built with the right heading structure.

And that's not something that I'm having a go at people about, but I think it's really important as a web developer to at least understand the basics of this.

And if you don't understand this at all, don't be frightened to actually learn a little bit about this.

You could go—you as if you're a web developer listening to this—you could listen to the other podcast episodes that I've created and you would get a really good idea of, "Oh, these are the things I need to start thinking about when I'm building these websites."

Because otherwise you're going to end up with clients that are unhappy, especially clients who've already got traffic coming through to their website; then nobody wants that.

After hearing a few stories, a few horror stories really where people have made these migrations with their website, they've paid people to do them for them, and then those people have just disappeared.

Or they've not really cared or not really had any kind of comeback on the fact that, hold on a minute, all of my clients, all of my leads have now stopped coming into my business and this is affecting my business, it's affecting my sales.

So it is one of those things that I would definitely say if you are considering even vaguely in the back of your mind, you're considering a big change to your website, whether that is migrating platforms, moving domain names, as I say, adding a shop, removing a shop, moving your blog, all of these kind of things.

If you are thinking about any change to your website, then think, please think about your SEO.

Check Your Google Search Console Before Any Change

Jules White: Now what you can do with this is you can actually go into your Google Search Console and understand what's happening with your website traffic.

I've had a few conversations with people over power hours and things where they've been thinking about making a change, and they want some general advice.

They want to understand a bit more about what the situation is with their website. And there's really no shame in this.

The majority of business owners that I speak to, especially small businesses, don't really know what's happening with the traffic on their website.

Especially if you don't track how your leads come into your business and you are not asking people where they found you.

And sometimes even if they are, sometimes people will say that they do track this and they say, "Yeah, I get a lot of clients coming in from Google," but they still don't associate that with their website.

And the fact that their website is set up in a way that it's then at least vaguely showing up on Google and clients are finding them from it.

So they need to preserve that before they start thinking about a new website.

And quite often when people think they need a new website, it's because of the visuals.

But if you're thinking about this, then looking at your Google Search Console and actually seeing how much traffic Google is sending through to your website, how many impressions your website is getting, and what queries, what search terms does Google already associate with your website?

And you might find in there that even if you're not getting a massive amount of traffic, you're getting some impressions.

Google understands about some of your pages and understands what you do and understands some important things about your business.

And even that, even just some basic understanding from Google, is a really good point to start.

So if you then end up losing all of those queries and all of that understanding that Google already has about your website, then it can be really hard to recover that.

And you're then starting from a completely blank slate again.

And we want to try and make the most of our websites and make the most of our SEO and let Google bring us clients when we are sitting on the beach or walking the dog or doing the thing that we actually love doing in our business.

The whole point, and the whole reason that I love SEO, and I love the fact that we can get clients whilst they're actually searching for businesses like ours, is the fact that it's a sustainable way to bring clients into your business.

So that's why I'm really passionate about helping, particularly women, to avoid these kind of situations where you've made a migration, you've made lots of changes, you've relied on somebody who is supposed to be a professional to help you with this, and then you're in a worse situation than you were if you'd have just left your website as it was.

So if you've looked at this and you've realised that you've got some traffic coming into your website, or even if you haven't, to be honest with you, if your website and your domain name has been live for a while and you don't feel like you're getting lots of traffic from Google, you might still have a lot of links out there.

There might be links coming into your website, which if you change it, if you change those URLs, if you lose that structure of your website, then you end up losing those links coming into your site.

And that in itself takes time to build up links coming into your website.

So Google actually, if you're thinking—so if you're thinking about start changing, if you're thinking about how...

How to Plan a Safe Migration: URLs & Redirects

Jules White: What can I do then? Jules, come on, tell me, you've told me that I need to be careful with this.

What do I need to do instead?

If you've actually made that decision, you understand the situation, you understand what Google knows about your website, and you understand the structure of your website as well.

So you understand what pages you have, what the URLs are, you understand all of the URLs that exist on your website, and that can be as simple as doing a scan, looking at what pages are there, and making sure that those URLs then get mapped to your new website.

And all that is just as simple as setting the URLs up properly on your new website.

Now, one of the things that can happen when you move platforms is you can get certain things built into platforms that prevent you from being able to use the same URLs.

So this is a situation with GoHighLevel where unfortunately, if you use the online shop that's built into the GoHighLevel website builder, it doesn't allow you to have complete flexibility with the URLs.

So it's one of those things that—this is where WordPress can be helpful because it's very flexible, so you can have complete control over all of those kind of things like the URLs and how you want to set it up.

But for most business owners setting up and learning WordPress, knowing which plugins to use, knowing how the plugins interact with each other, and setting up a WooCommerce store, which is like the WordPress version of an online store, can be really overwhelming and it's quite hard then to find out how to do that yourself.

If you get somebody else to set it up for you, then that can be a real nightmare in terms of actually understanding how to make even simple changes to your website.

So being aware of all of this when you are thinking about a migration is really important.

When to Change Platforms (and When Not To)

Jules White: And when you are thinking about this, when you're asking yourself the question of, "Do I need a new website?"

Nine times out of 10, I would probably say you don't need a brand new website, and there will be things on your existing website that you can work with.

Now, there are situations where definitely moving to a new website builder and moving to a new website is important.

And one of the biggest things with this is if you are completely dependent on a developer to make any changes to your website at all.

If nobody in your business outside of the developer can make changes to your website and you're a small business, so you don't have a big marketing team where that's literally somebody's job to make changes to your website, then you are very much beholden to that person.

I have talked to a few people over the years who've not been able to get hold of the web developer—that the person has ghosted them or they're just—they're really slow to respond.

So, they might see a spelling mistake on their website or something changes, or they put the prices up and they need to make these changes to the website.

That sometimes can be an indication that moving platforms might be the right choice for them.

It might be, but it also might not be.

Especially if you've got an existing website that's doing really well, then there might be other things that you need to do.

It might be that you need somebody to give you some instruction on how to use your website.

It might be that you need your developer to actually allow you to make changes to your website.

This is one of the things that does happen sometimes is where developers will not even allow businesses or business owners to have access to their DNS records or access to the full backend of their website because they're worried about them deleting things, making changes, breaking it, all of those kind of things that can happen.

But you are an adult, and as long as you understand what bits to change, what bits not to change, the consequences of doing that and that if you do break something, then yes, you might have to pay somebody to fix it for you.

But I firmly believe that you are an adult, you are a business owner, and you are capable of a lot more than a lot of web developers would have you think that you can really.

Now, one of the reasons you might need to change to a different website builder is if your website has been hand-coded.

Unfortunately, that is one of the things that can happen.

Not as much now, I have to say; I definitely think now in the last few years we've had massive developments in website builders and websites are a lot easier to create in a builder like Squarespace, FEA Create, even with WordPress.

Drag-and-drop builders that are actually in the platform has made it less likely that websites are going to be hand-coded, but some of them still are and there are some very old websites out there as well that maybe are hand-coded.

In that situation, then potentially moving is going to be the best option.

But that is definitely a place where you would need to have a plan.

You need to make sure that what's on your old website is then moving over onto the new version and that everything is mapped so that you don't then end up losing that traffic.

The WWW vs Non-WWW Problem

Jules White: One of the things that happened with this client this week was that they—their old website used to be—so probably before I start explaining that, I should explain, there are potentially four versions of your website that could be live.

So there is the www version, there's the non-www version, there's the HTTPS version—if you've seen that in the little website builder where you see the padlock symbol—and then there's the non-HTTPS version.

And Google treats these like four different types of websites.

And if you don't redirect everything all to one, then that can cause real problems.

Where Google's got duplicate versions of this site, it doesn't really know which one is the correct one.

And if Google's understanding of the old version of your website is the www version and when the site gets migrated, it gets set to the non-www version, that can be a real problem because Google is basically seeing that all of those old www versions of your website have now disappeared.

And that is a real problem.

And that was one of the things that we were able to fix right away with this client this week where I had a quick look at her website and I could immediately see that was one of the problems that had caused her traffic to disappear.

And she'd actually worked with another SEO professional in the meantime after getting her site migrated.

So she'd worked with one professional who'd actually migrated her site, completely disregarded any SEO and any existing traffic and any existing pages, and made that mistake with the www version versus the non-www version.

And then she'd worked with another SEO professional and they hadn't picked up on this.

And this was—this is something which is a fundamental thing.

It's a fundamental problem. If it doesn't get addressed, and if it doesn't get sorted, then you are almost starting from scratch really, in terms of what Google can understand about this, what it's treating as a new version of your website, the non-www version of it.

Now, if you've got a brand new website, if you're just setting up a new domain, it doesn't really matter whether you use the www version or the non-www version, but you need to redirect one of them.

So like my own website is if you type in www.thewebsitesuccesshub.com, it will redirect to the non-www version of it.

So this is something that I never realised with this before I started learning SEO and I think a lot of people don't realise this.

I've had other people get in touch with me and say, "Why are there two versions? Like the old version of the website is still showing this and the new one is showing this."

And actually, yeah, it's not until you point it out that—actually—that's two different websites essentially to Google.

So all this to say, I feel like this has been a little bit of a just a ranty episode of the podcast.

But fundamentally, what I want you to understand as business owners is:

Firstly, if you are paying somebody to move your website, don't assume that they're going to know about this stuff and don't assume that they will do something with it.

And they may say to you that they build an SEO-friendly website.

I've seen this a lot, especially in the online world where when you look at what people are promising, when they're saying, "Oh yeah, you can get a five-page website and it gets this, this, this," and they're saying SEO-friendly.

But I look at the client sites that they've built and I can see that they're not SEO-friendly.

What 'SEO Friendly' Actually Means

Jules White: SEO-friendly is the basics of making sure that your site is mobile responsive, using correct heading hierarchy on a page so that the bots can read through your website and understand these are the important parts.

This is, you know, these are the headings on this page, this is the topics that this page is about.

And that is a basic; if you're building a website anyway, and you've got to put that copy onto the page, setting it up with a good hierarchy is a fundamental.

That's not advanced SEO. That's just something that should happen as a good practise in building websites.

Page speed is another one that's really important and becoming more important than ever with AI search.

So if a website is set up with massive image file sizes on there, or loads of unnecessary code, that's from the way that people use website builders and from just adding extra things in that don't need to go into a website, then that's a real problem.

Google likes all pages of a website to load within three seconds.

But Google is a little bit more forgiving than the AI bots.

So Google will try again to crawl through a website.

Whereas the AI bots, if your website doesn't load quick enough, they're off and they're recommending something else as well.

They will not hang around and wait for a slow website or even a slowish website to load.

So definitely worth thinking about that.

Having a good, logical structure for your pages of your website so that your pages make sense.

Having a sitemap submitted to Google so that Google can crawl through and understand how those pages all work together.

Having good internal links, making sure that your pages do link together and not having broken links.

These are all just basic SEO as a website is being set up, not changing everything all at once.

Google, as I say, doesn't like a fresh start.

Google much prefers that if the website content and all of the code in the backend—which you don't see, you wouldn't see that as looking at the front end of a website...

So as with this client this week, the new version of the website looked pretty much the same as the old one, but it's still because it's built in a different platform, because a lot of those URLs have changed.

The backend code of that website that Google and the AI bots are reading through is completely different, and Google will treat it as a completely different website really.

Those kind of things are the foundations.

Even things like adding schema markups—so we adding structured data into your pages—helps the bots understand not just the content, but also the context of that content.

So it helps you. It basically helps them to understand your website pages a lot easier and a lot better.

That is all the things that are just the fundamentals.

So asking these questions to your website builder is definitely worth asking those questions.

I think you will probably get an idea from their response whether they understand about this kind of stuff, whether they don't.

And if they don't, but you still really like them, you still want to work with them, then that's where getting somebody like myself to come in and do a pre-migration audit of your site.

So that you can understand what are the important things to change, what are the important things not to change, what guidance does your web developer need in order to make sure that you don't end up losing all your precious traffic just because you're thinking about a new website.

So those are the questions I would be asking a web developer.

If you're thinking about it, if you're thinking about migrating it yourself, great.

You've got more control over what you can do.

I would still recommend having a session with myself to help you understand a bit more about what's precious, what you shouldn't be losing, and whether you actually even need to do that as well.

Because I think we can end up having this shiny object syndrome of feeling like if I get a new website, if I change my branding, if I change the visual layout of my website, that it's going to solve problems for me.

It's going to help me to bring in more clients, it's going to help me to attract more leads.

It's going to help more people to convert. I'm going to feel more confident sharing my website.

And you may feel more confident to share it, but having a whole new website is not necessarily the solution to that.

So if you don't like your existing website, having everything starting from scratch, throwing out everything from the old one, moving it, losing your traffic, and then still ending up in the same situation where maybe now you've got a website that you like a bit more, but it's still not bringing you traffic.

It's still not actually doing its job properly, it's still not acting as the most hardworking team member of your business, which it should be.

Your website should be bringing you in clients and leads every single day.

And if that's not happening, then changing everything is not necessarily going to help that.

And a lot of people will think about fixing their SEO whilst they're doing this website change, but realistically, you need to approach it slightly differently.

So if you are thinking about building your SEO and you're thinking about "I want my website working for my business," then don't think about it at the point where you are also thinking about a brand new website.

Or have a chat with me first and see whether you even need to have a brand new website, or can you invest that time and that money in actually getting your existing website working for you and working for your business.

So if you want to listen to some more episodes around this, I've got episode 10, which is "Website Migration Mistakes that can Sabotage your SEO," where I talked about a client who had 8,000 images on her website and the things that you need to consider if you are thinking about changing.

Closing Thoughts & Next Steps

Jules White: I hope this has been helpful.

This has been an episode where I feel like I've just come on and just talked, basically.

If you need some help with this, if you are thinking about a website migration, if you're thinking about "Why is my website not working for me? Why is it not working for my business?"

Then visit my website, thewebsitesuccesshub.com, and you can explore my services there.

I can help you with website migration plans, SEO action plans, how to get your business showing up in AI search.

How to show yourself in search as the authority that you already are in what you do, and that your website can become your hardest-working team member.

You can spend less time marketing your business on social media and really just embrace a business that you love.

Thanks again, and I'll see you soon. Bye.