Migrating SEO equity
Migrating SEO equity is a crucial step in your Sitecore to WordPress migration process. It’s about preserving and transferring all the SEO value your site has built up over time—like your search engine rankings, organic traffic, and keyword performance—so you don’t have to start from scratch on WordPress. Here’s how to go about it.
Setting up redirects for migrating from Sitecore to WordPress
Now use the URL mapping from your initial discovery stage and decide what you want to do about the different links:
- Identity the links that you’ll retain as they are—like the link to your homepage.
- Next, mark the links that will simply use a new WordPress slug. For example, yourwebsite.com/content/blog/article-title on Sitecore will become yourwebsite.com/blog/article-title on WordPress.
- Finally, mark all links that will need to move to a new link. For example, yourwebsite.com/content/services/service-abc on Sitecore could become yourwebsite.com/services/service-abc or yourwebsite.com/service-abc (or however you prefer) on WordPress.
Next, map the existing URLs to how you see them working on WordPress. Also, work out how you’re going to actually migrate them. You can do part of this mapping in an automated way, but some of these (where you’re moving a content asset to a new link) will need to be handled manually.
Use this table for your URL mapping exercise:
| Content Asset | Sitecore URL | WordPress URL | Redirect Type | Action |
| General site page | /about-us | /about-us | 301 Redirect | Direct match; maintain URL |
| Blog posts | /content/blog/article-title | /blog/article-title | 301 Redirect | Pattern match for all blog posts. This can be “bulk-mapped” using standard rules. |
| Service pages | /content/service/service-abc | /service-abc | 301 Redirect | Custom mapping for service pages. This needs to be done on a page by page basis. |
| General site page | /contact-us | /contact | 301 Redirect | Also custom mapping. Update URL to match new naming. |
Migrating the SEO metadata
Next, you need to move your SEO data from your Sitecore instance to the new WordPress stack.
To do so, use one of the export tools we discussed in the content migration section and . For example, you could use Sitecore powershell scripts to export your SEO meta data (including any custom schema markup you may be using on your Sitecore site).
For importing them to WordPress, consider using a plugin like Yoast.
Take care of technical SEO optimizations
While your SEO plugin will already do the bulk of your WordPress SEO (through importing your SEO metadata, schema data, and URLs), yet there’s technical optimization to do.
- Optimizing images: Compressing images is key for reducing page load times. Consider plugins like Smush or ShortPixel or compress your images manually before uploading them.
- Analytics & tracking integration: Once your Google Analytics and Tag Manager codes are set up in WordPress, verify that tracking works correctly across all pages. If you’ve any custom tracking, test that too.
- Page speed optimizations: Improve your site’s loading times with caching or Content Delivery Networks for better performance.
Post migration, you’ll also need to generate a new XML sitemap using your SEO plugin (most SEO plugins support sitemaps) and submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
