Website Host Migration: Friend or Foe?
An Introduction to Website Hosting & Migration
Website hosting is the service that allows individuals and organizations to make their websites accessible via the internet. Many of your favorite websites that are managed by a business you support are likely using a hosting platform.
Hosting providers store your website files on powerful servers, making sure that visitors can reach your site around the clock. In earlier posts, we mentioned that practice of Reliability Engineering and Service Level Agreements. Hosting providers likely have some form of agreements with specific accounts related to service performance. Remember those service level indicators and objectives we mentioned, yep! Those are the internal methods to ensure these business remain in compliance with those agreements.
Now, back to the matter at hand. Depending on your own needs, hosting options range from:
Shared hosting
Dedicated servers
Cloud hosting
Each option offers different levels of performance, control, and scalability. Things that need to be considered when selecting the right provider for you.
Website migration involves moving your website from one hosting environment to another. This process can include transferring files, databases, email accounts, and domain settings. Migration is often necessary when upgrading to better infrastructure, optimizing performance, or changing hosting providers. A successful migration minimizes downtime and maintains the integrity of your site’s content and functionality.
The size of your website and amount of traffic towards it, needs to be considered to ensure maximum availability to your consumers. In this case, this was not too much to manage
Understanding Technical Communication and Transactions in Web Hosting
Web hosting involves a series of technical communications and transactions that allow websites to be accessible over the internet. At its core, web hosting connects a client device—typically a user’s computer or mobile device—to a remote server where website data is stored. Transactions occur in a request and response manner.
Keep reading to better understand the basic networking transactions that occur during website transactions.
Key Networking Concepts
1. DNS Resolution: When a user enters a website URL, the Domain Name System (DNS) translates that human-readable address into an IP address. This IP address points to the hosting server’s location on the internet.
2. TCP/IP Protocols: The transmission control protocol (TCP) and internet protocol (IP) work together to ensure data packets travel from the client to the server reliably. TCP manages the connection and data integrity, while IP handles routing across networks.
3. HTTP/HTTPS Requests: After DNS resolution, the client’s browser sends an HTTP or HTTPS request to the server. HTTPS encrypts this communication using SSL/TLS for security. The server then processes the request and returns the appropriate web page content.
4. Server Processing: On the server side, software such as Apache or Nginx manages incoming requests, retrieves the requested files or data from storage, and communicates responses back to the client.
5. Session Management: For dynamic websites, session protocols like cookies or tokens maintain user state between multiple requests to provide personalized experiences.
6. Data Transfer and Bandwidth: Hosting involves continuous data transfers reliant on bandwidth capacity which defines the volume of data that can be sent over the network in a given time.
Web hosting transactions rely on a coordinated sequence of networking activities, protocols, and infrastructure components to deliver seamless and secure access to websites worldwide. Understanding these concepts is crucial for optimizing web hosting performance and reliability. In addition, you can use networking tools within your favorite browser to better visualize lower level steps that occur during this process.
Migrating a website is a complex technical process, and sometimes not because it’s difficult but because of the impact that can occur on many of the features we care about. It significantly impacts website analytics and content performance metrics, which we can often overlook. From an engineering and technology perspective, understanding these changes is crucial so that we accurately interpret traffic data, and ensure a smooth transition.
Immediate Drops and Fluctuations in Traffic Metrics
During and shortly after migration, analytics platforms will often show a noticeable drop in website traffic. This is primarily due to:
URL Structure Changes: New URLs or altered URL paths without proper redirects cause loss of page tracking and break existing referral and ranking signals.
Tracking Code Discrepancies: If analytics tracking codes are not properly re-implemented or configured on the new website, data collection pauses or becomes inconsistent.
DNS Propagation Delays: Changes in domain name system (DNS) records take time to propagate globally, causing intermittent accessibility issues that reduce visitor counts temporarily.
Changes in User Behavior and Engagement Data
Many of the changes listed throughout this post and the removal or addition of new features can have a positive or negative impact on the user experience. User engagement statistics, such as bounce rate, average session duration, and pages per session, can show irregular patterns post-migration. These fluctuations occur because:
Broken or Missing Assets: If images, scripts, or stylesheets do not load correctly after migration, user experience degrades, leading to higher bounce rates.
Content Restructuring: Changes in navigation or page layout can alter visitor flow and interaction patterns, impacting click-through rates and conversion funnels.
Search Engine Ranking Volatility: Search engines require time to re-index the migrated website, potentially reducing organic traffic and affecting keyword position metrics.
Technical Steps to Mitigate Impact on Analytics
To minimize disruptions to analytics data and maintain continuity, organizations should implement the following:
301 Redirects: Properly map old URLs to new URLs using permanent redirects to preserve SEO value and maintain referral tracking.
Dual Tracking Implementation: Temporarily run tracking codes on both old and new sites during migration to compare data sets and ensure completeness.
Verify Analytics Configuration: Confirm that analytics snippets are correctly placed on all migrated pages and that goals or events are replicated.
Sitemap and Robots.txt Updates: Update XML sitemaps and robots.txt files to reflect the new site structure and assist search engines in faster indexing.
Monitor Real-Time Analytics: Use real-time analytics dashboards to quickly identify and resolve potential data collection issues immediately after migration.
Long-Term Statistical Adjustments and Analysis
Post-migration, analytics teams should expect a period of statistical adjustment where baseline metrics stabilize and normalize. It is critical to:
Set Comparative Baselines: Compare traffic data week-over-week or month-over-month while accounting for seasonality and marketing activities.
Analyze Traffic Sources Separately: Evaluate organic, direct, referral, and paid traffic channels individually to pinpoint sources of change.
Track Conversion Rates and Funnel Progression: Monitor how changes impact business goals like lead generation or e-commerce sales, adjusting strategies accordingly.
From a technical perspective, website hosting migration affects content and traffic analytics, introducing temporary volatility in data. The more we understand our requirements, prepare features, and use backups the less volatility. Intentional preparation, precise implementation of redirects and tracking, with continuous monitoring are essential to maintain integrity in analytics reporting and minimize disruptions. Understanding the various impacts will enable you to make informed decision and better outcomes during and after a website migration, improving the customer experience for your target audience.
My Experience Migrating This Website
During the migration of this website, I focused on carefully planning each step to ensure a smooth transition. The process began with a comprehensive audit of existing content, configurations, and feature mapping of one platform to the other. Feature mapping is something identified in hindsight, rather than realized during planning. Moving to the new hosting platform, I realized:
A decrease in available features.
Less flexibility in configuration options.
Less flexible configurations for podcast feeds.
Increased simplicity
Improved price point.
Sleeker UI and other aesthetics.
Decrease in capabilities for formatting code in content posts.
When thinking about feature mapping, it’s important to pay attention to the persona you assume. There’s a preference for the former provider due to the increase technical capabilities. Hosting on the new platform limits technical capabilities and available features. There’s a plus to it, focusing on other things instead of site and content management. There’s minus, is not feeling as technically capable.
In other scenarios utilizing reliable backup solutions is important. I secured all critical data locally, to avoid any loss during transfer.
The migration itself involved replicating the website’s content on the new platform, and testing functionality rigorously before pointing domain settings to the new host. I forgot to include that plus, domain and website hosting being coupled together now.
This approach minimized downtime and preserved SEO rankings by maintaining the same URL structure and site architecture. Challenges such as incorporating images into their respective files required simple scripting to mass address extension handling. Not much of a big deal, but an export file from one platform that is compatible with the new platform for upload would have saved me a lot of time.
Final Thoughts
Overall, this migration was a simple but valuable exercise in applying technical expertise and project management skills to enhance and simplify website management. I’m unable to speak to performance at this stage. It also serves as a growth point, from my days of using Jekyll to deploy simplistic websites from local repository. If you are considering a similar move, thoughtful planning and execution is key to avoiding common pitfalls.