One of the scariest things a company may have to do is move the corporate website. You've spent years, maybe even a decade cultivating your SEO ranking and back-linking to other sites and you want to preserve your efforts when you need to transition to another hosting service. Where 2 Get It is actually in the process of moving our site off of Word Press to improve our ability to make changes and updates more frequently.

Here are some top of mind things you must do when moving a website.

1.       Use 301 redirects. Setup 301 redirects for each page on your site. 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently".

2.       Test your redirection. You can Test your redirection with Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker

3.       Update external links. As much as is practical, ask the webmaster of any site that is linking to yours to update their links to reflect the new site.

4.       Use webmaster tools from search engines. This enables you to manage the change of address process, update your XML site map and check for broken links.

5.       Resubmit site map to Google. Google has to re-crawl your site at its new location to re-index your site.

6.       Keep both sites live until it is completely moved over. Expect the unexpected when moving your website. So as to not go down completely, it's important to keep both sites live until your webmaster is confident everything is correctly moved.

7.       Check all pages, links, downloads. When your website moves often the back end code can change. Either because it's indexed on the site map differently or because it's being recognized differently on the new host. Either way, checking your pages, links and downloads to ensure everything is in proper working order is critical.

8.     Don't forget to change the TTL (Time To Live) value of your DNS settings for your domain. This instructs DNS servers to re-check the IP address before they visit your site.

9.     Create a custom 404 error page. This is for pages that you're not going to migrate.