SaaS Website Migration: SEO Migration Considerations

Planning for a website design and/or migration to a different CMS?

Here’s a little food for thought:

There were a handful of times last year alone that I’ve personally seen the negative impact of a botched migration:

A lot of designers and design teams are generally not marketers, SEOs,  or conversion experts – they’re experts in design – which is their specific craft.

Website design changes at the strategic level are best built around desired business outcomes and lead from a specific strategic marketing direction.

Want to keep your hard-earned right-fit traffic after migration?

High-level, here’s what you want to keep in mind to save yourself some  trouble in the near future:

1. Are we planning to migrate to the best CMS for our needs?

There are way too many custom-built back-ends that rather should have been built on a platform like WebFlow or WordPress.

This massively reduces the headaches for marketing teams when later making modifications, without the continual need for development or engineering involvement.

Before considering a custom-built solution, question if you *truly* need that level of customization.

My suggestion?

Do some research on WebFlow before diving into custom-built solutions – it more than likely can serve everything you’d need if you think you need deep customization, and will allow for easy marketing-based modifications in the future. 

The reason pre-built CMS solutions like WebFlow are so powerful is that they already have for the most part:

• Nailed down optimizations for page speed, and mobile accessibility
• Handling of defining SEO on-page items
• Easy canonicalization setup and handling

Basically – the vast majority of important Technical SEO items are already handled for you out of the box.

Why would you want to custom-code all of that when you can have a well-oiled machine that runs and drives all of your marketing wishes and desires?

2. Are we providing clear direction?

You need to have a solid planning framework for bringing improvements to the new design, rather than just coating the walls with some fresh paint.

This is the perfect opportunity to find weaknesses in the old design – and make massive improvements with the new one – that comes from auditing and finding those weaknesses, and making a checklist of improvements and needs in the new design:

Here are some examples of what you might find on your existing website: 

• ❌  We’re offering multiple conversion options (CTAs) on our landers, but we should consolidate that into one singular offer to improve conversions.
• ❌  We’re focused on a particular segment, but we’re positioned as a general solution for all markets
• ❌  Lack of clear homepage positioning and lead magnet implementation
• ❌  Strategy and structure for building landing pages for use cases, user benefits, industries, etc.

A great exercise to conduct before the re-design is actually running a Growth Audit on the current website to uncover those improvements, and bring them to the table to provide direction for the re-design agency – rather than just saying “go for it, we trust you.”

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3. Are we building structured templates for the core page types we’ll need?

You’re planning to spend budget on a re-design, so it’s not only about building-out new pages – but getting down to the granular level of page structure for conversions.

Examples include:

• CTAs above-the-fold on conversion pages
• Alternative CTAs for those not ready yet to book a demo
• Lead magnet positioning
• Structuring competitor comparison pages

It’s not enough just to throw up a page template and hope for the best.

There needs to be a structure based on previous data points which can build a proven high-converting page, which can then later be A/B tested further for squeezing even more juice from the page.

There’s no reason to jump in blind – a bit of homework goes a long way.

The best advice for a re-design is to have your team heavily involved and know exactly what you want to get out of the new design.

If that experience doesn’t come from in-house, and the design agency lacks (this should be clear by asking the right questions during initial conversations), bring in a third party that can steer you clear of mistakes and headaches down the road.

Final Thoughts on SaaS Website Redesigns

The redesign process can be an exciting time – looking forward to launching and seeing an impact on demos and signups.

But – without proper execution, you could go the opposite way and see a massive drop off from past performance.

Use the above considerations during your internal planning process even before hiring or starting working with a designer or design team – ask the right questions, and you’ll get the answers you need to know.