A significant international brand recently requested my support for a website shutdown project. The business wasn’t generating enough revenue to support itself and turn a profit. Multiple other closely related businesses in the market are owned by the same global brand.
It’s simple to shut down a website, but what and how do you do it when you also need to perform redirects?
Making the shutdown seamless and diverting half of the traffic to one website and the other half to another was one of the requirements. The kind of product was what made the decision.
What makes it a “split migration”?
Changing the domain and URLs, redesigning the site, or switching platforms are all common steps in a website migration. Even on a small website, it can be tedious, and the problems you might encounter will only get worse as a site grows larger.
Now picture a site that needs to be migrated that has thousands of pages or products. The difficulty of having to move sections of one site between two other sites should also be considered.
How do you move thousands of pages and products to two existing websites that are different from one another?
Even though I had never performed a split migration up until this point, I knew roughly where to begin and how to get started.
Sadly, migrations involve more than just a simple redirect. Even though every migration has its challenges, this one was a little less challenging because it only involved redirecting URLs from the source to the destination page(s).
The procedure would be more laborious for a typical migration or platform, though, if it involved:
- Metadata
- Content
- Headings
- 404 errors
- Existing redirects
- Images
- Etc.