Websites increasingly influence how personal trainers, coaches, and fitness business owners market and provide products and services. If you are considering migrating your website, weighing up the pros and cons and ensuring you understand what is involved in website migration and how it could impact your business moving forward is beneficial.
This guide will provide a detailed overview of site migration, outline critical steps and processes, and bust common migration myths. We've also included a handy checklist to help ensure a seamless transition.
What is a site migration?
Site migration is a term used to describe any significant change to your fitness website, for example, a change of host, platform, domain, or design. Whether you are considering moving your site from one host or platform to another or want to alter the structure and layout, planning meticulously to reduce the risk of delays and disruptions and simplify the process is crucial.
Types of Site Migration
There are multiple types of site migration, and many personal trainers might need help understanding the extent of these. Still, anything that could significantly impact your website's ranking in the search engines can be classified as a migration.
- Location migrations: Changing the domain, rebranding, and moving from HTTP to HTTPS are a few examples.
- Platform migrations: These could be a complete migration when you move your website from WordPress to Wix, for example, or part migrations when you upgrade your platform's version or add new platform features.
- Content migrations: Whenever you make significant changes to your fitness website's content, including adding and removing pages, hiding sections, consolidating content, or even adding new languages.
- Structural migrations: Changing the layout of a page, navigation menu structure, internal links, or even lead generation funnel changes.
- Design migrations: Changing the user experience by changing the design elements, adding or removing sections, and media changes.
For example, if you already work with a web designer and decide to hire someone else, your fitness website will likely need to go through a combination or all of the above changes, most of which will cost you money and time. Hence, it's paramount that you have a strategy before making the change.
Steps to a Successful Website Migration
A successful fitness website migration means that you're happy with the new website that goes live on time, serves your ideal clients' needs, and is built meeting UX and design best practices. Most importantly, the transition would cause any disruption in your website being live online.
You'll need a plan if you'd like your website migration to go smoothly and without headaches. Follow these steps to execute a successful site migration:
You'll need a plan if you'd like your website migration to go smoothly and without headaches. Follow these steps to execute a successful site migration:
Step 1. Understand the Purpose
Before you start the migration process, it's wise to identify reasons to migrate the site, outline the objectives and define your targets clearly. There are several reasons to consider site migration for your personal training, coaching, or fitness company, including updating your site from HTTP to HTTPS, expanding into international markets, enhancing site design, and boosting web traffic. Before you start migrating your fitness website, ensure you're aware of the primary goals.
When you know what you want to achieve from a website migration, you can focus on how you will oversee the process and ensure that everything runs smoothly. At this point, it's essential to consider your budget for the project and establish a timeline. You'll also need to think about who is taking on what role. Are you taking charge of the site migration yourself, or are you working with a web design company? Every individual who is involved should have a clear understanding of their role.
Step 2. Benchmark Your Existing Website
Benchmarking a website is a way of discovering how your site compares to others. A thorough, effective benchmark analysis will provide in-depth, helpful information about site performance and help you highlight weaknesses and areas for improvement before starting your fitness website migration.
Step 3. Wireframe the New Site
A website wireframe is a blueprint that maps out your new website, providing information about its features, pages, and design. Wireframing is beneficial for gaining an insight into how the site will function, as well as how it will look. You can use the wireframe to plan the site design and page layout and structure, prioritize content and influence user experience and flow.
Justinmind offers a free wireframe tool if you're looking for one, but you can also grab pen and paper and draft it y hand. The most important to consider here is who your ideal clients are, what their buyer journey will be, so you can create something THEY need and are looking for.
Step 4. Get to Work
Now you'll need to get down to business and set up the theme, create the layout, design elements, content, and visuals for your personal trainer website, and put it all together. When you work with a fitness website designer to do this for you, they will do the actual work, but you'll need to provide feedback and instructions to ensure the project is heading in the right direction.
It'll be crucial to ensure all your main pages are optimized for SEO, the website is secure for visitors to submit their data, and it provides all the essential info about your business that a potential client might need. This includes your business address, terms and conditions, privacy policy, and clear instructions on how they can contact you.
It'll be crucial to ensure all your main pages are optimized for SEO, the website is secure for visitors to submit their data, and it provides all the essential info about your business that a potential client might need. This includes your business address, terms and conditions, privacy policy, and clear instructions on how they can contact you.
Step 5. Migrate & Launch
When your new site is ready and happy, you must point your domain to your new website's hosting server. If you're keeping the domain you've been using, this process might also affect your business emails, so ensure you liaise with your domain registrar and business email provider to ensure the least amount of disruptions.
You can generate hype before the launch, especially if you haven't been promoting your website in the past.
You can generate hype before the launch, especially if you haven't been promoting your website in the past.
To execute a successful launch, test pages, check functionality and ease of use, make sure every link works, and test your site on mobile to make sure it's accessible to mobile users. Eliminating issues and improving in the pre-launch stage is better than correcting mistakes and addressing problems after the launch.
Step 6. Drive Traffic to Your New Fitness Website
When you launch your new website, promoting it and encouraging existing clients, prospects, and social media followers to take a look once it's live is beneficial. However, just because you've shared your first blog with your audience once, it doesn't mean you'll have website visitors flowing toward your new website till the end of time.
You'll need to make a consistent effort in your marketing to send visitors to your web pages, so more and more potential leads land on your fitness website. There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, including free and paid marketing methods like social media, email marketing, Facebook and Google Ads or even guest blogging.
You'll need to make a consistent effort in your marketing to send visitors to your web pages, so more and more potential leads land on your fitness website. There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, including free and paid marketing methods like social media, email marketing, Facebook and Google Ads or even guest blogging.
If nobody sees your shiny new website, there is no way of knowing if your website fulfills its purpose you determined in the first steps. Until you have many daily visitors to your website, stay on this step and repeat because the next step only brings any result if you have data.
Step 7. Monitor New Site Performance
After launching your new website, it's crucial to monitor performance to ensure that the site is working effectively and give you an insight into how you're achieving your objectives and goals. Collect and analyze data, specify key metrics, ask for client and user feedback, and use analytics and tools to help you track progress and identify weaknesses. Ongoing analysis can help you increase your chances of hitting targets.
Common Myths About Website Migration
If you have read negative comments about website migration or encountered horror stories, it's important to distinguish fact from fiction. Here are some common myths about website migration:
Migrating websites will crash your website.
There is a risk of crashing your website during a site migration, but this shouldn't happen if you have planned and drawn up an effective strategy. If you're not confident about executing a website migration, or you don't have experienced individuals on your team, it's wise to seek expert advice to reduce the risk of downtime and save you time, money, and effort.
Migrating websites will ruin your SEO.
Losing traffic and ruining SEO is a common fear for business owners considering site migration. The truth is that migrating websites can positively impact SEO and online visibility, provided that it is done correctly. It's possible to redirect traffic from an old site to a new one without negatively impacting search ranking or authority. In the long term, you can benefit from providing customers access to a better website offering a superior user experience.
Migrating websites will make you lose content.
Migrating a website doesn't mean that you will automatically lose content. You can transfer content from an old to a new website, prioritizing high-quality, impactful content. Decide what you want to migrate, draw up a content migration plan, and check your new site before you launch.
Migrating websites will crash your website.
There is a risk of crashing your website during a site migration, but this shouldn't happen if you have planned and drawn up an effective strategy. If you're not confident about executing a website migration, or you don't have experienced individuals on your team, it's wise to seek expert advice to reduce the risk of downtime and save you time, money, and effort.
Migrating websites will ruin your SEO.
Losing traffic and ruining SEO is a common fear for business owners considering site migration. The truth is that migrating websites can positively impact SEO and online visibility, provided that it is done correctly. It's possible to redirect traffic from an old site to a new one without negatively impacting search ranking or authority. In the long term, you can benefit from providing customers access to a better website offering a superior user experience.
Migrating websites will make you lose content.
Migrating a website doesn't mean that you will automatically lose content. You can transfer content from an old to a new website, prioritizing high-quality, impactful content. Decide what you want to migrate, draw up a content migration plan, and check your new site before you launch.
Conclusion
Migrating a fitness website can benefit coaches, personal trainers, and fitness business owners looking to enhance performance, attract new clients and optimize the user experience. If you're considering migrating your site, it's critical to outline your objectives and create a detailed plan. Use a checklist to execute a seamless transition, test your site before it launches, and seek expert advice if you have queries or questions. There are risks, but they will pay off if you check all the boxes and follow best practice guidelines.
