Preparing to Migrate
Prior to the migration, the health insurance company utilized available AEM templates and page layouts to create the new subdomain site in a style similar to the primary parent company domain. They also migrated all content from the old domain to the new subdomain and updated all internal links to point to new website pages. Additionally, they mapped redirects from individual pages on the old site to new pages on the new subdomain. They also stripped out ineffective pages from the website.
Wheelhouse DMG assisted in pre-migration support by:
- Reviewing and providing guidance to the redirect map
- Checking the created XML sitemap and robots.txt file format
- Reviewing content placement and internal link updates
- Developing a reporting scorecard to monitor performance pre- and post-migration
- Offering general consulting on migration and redirect best practices for the team
Going Live
At the end of January 2019, the new subdomain went live. Unfortunately, redirects from the old domain were not published at that time, due to limiting factors between the company, their parent company, and another subsidiary of the parent company who managed the hosting of all the medical insurance company’s domains.
The new website did begin to receive a small amount of traffic, but because it wasn’t publicly promoted, nor were redirects in place, most pages weren’t indexed by Google search, which meant the site did not experience any issues with duplicate content and duplicate domains in the search engines.
By March 2019, redirects from the old site to the new one were published. Immediately upon publication, Google Analytics began reporting traffic to the new site, showing that tagging and analytics support was executed well. At the same time, Wheelhouse DMG submitted the new subdomain’s XML sitemap to Google Search Console for full indexation, crawled the site to identify any internal crawl errors, and reviewed the redirects to ensure they were executed correctly.
