Merging companies? How to successfully merge your websites

Planning a merge or acquisition? Then merging domains is something to handle carefully. It can be a challenging and complex process. Without a measured plan to audit and redirect legacy content, you’ll likely confuse customers who are counting on a smooth user experience. With a seamless merging of domains, however, you’ll be able to enjoy all the benefits of merging two brands.

Here, we’ll discuss how to successfully merge websites and redirect URLs properly, while avoiding chaos and poor user experience.

Where to start when merging websites

When two companies merge, whether it’s through a takeover, buyout or acquisition, the entire IT infrastructure will need to be restructured. It's important to pursue a consistent customer experience, even though you're going through a radical change behind the curtain.

The goal is to preserve your domain's SEO authority, or page rank, while developing a more robust information architecture. All without disrupting accessibility and user experience. Merging domains seamlessly is key. But how do you achieve that? There are some important steps to start with.

Plan your migration

To merge websites, you’ll need to migrate a website to a new domain. Website migration is a challenging operation. So before you start this humongous process, be sure to develop an extensive plan. Determine what you hope to gain, or keep, in the process. Analyze the traffic of your current site, and consider how a migration might affect your SEO and keyword ranking. Also, consider how you want to restructure the information architecture, and how you want to set up your redirects. If you ask yourself the right questions upfront, you will save time on fixing problems in the future, when everything should already be running smoothly.

Make an inventory of all URLs

In order to merge websites successfully, you will need to make an inventory of every URL from each company. This will help you develop a new information architecture and set up the proper redirects to keep your SEO authority intact. Your inventory should cover all core content pages, such as product pages, service pages, contact pages and the about pages. It’s important to use 301 redirects for these pages to pass on the full link equity, which influences your overall SEO authority.

Other pages that shouldn’t be missing in your inventory include your high performing content, such as blogs with many backlinks. Analyze which pages generate the most engagement, and redirect them to your new domain.

A merging of websites is also an opportunity to get rid of any excess content. A lean website that only holds the most relevant content will rank higher than a bulky website which is full of unused content.

Set up redirects to forward a domain to another website

Once you have made an inventory of all your URLs, an important next step is to match and redirect URLs from one domain to their closest counterparts of the destination domain. It might be a tempting idea to redirect all the pages from one domain to the destination domain’s homepage. But this will frustrate users who are looking for specific information. And you will lose domain authority.

Determine which of the URLs from your inventory need to be migrated, and what type of redirects you want to use with them. For permanent page migration, it’s best to use 301 redirects, to pass on full SEO authority. 302 redirects can on the other hand be used for A/B testing and maintenance of pages. Learn more about the difference between 301 and 302 redirects. 

A commonly made mistake during a migration is changing a URL without setting up a redirect. This means the URL will show up as a broken link, and all its SEO equity will be lost.

Use redirect.pizza to smoothly merge your websites

If you want to be sure your traffic is flowing in the right direction during your company merge, redirect.pizza can help. What will you gain by using our tool?

Add redirects in no-time

The service of redirect.pizza comes with an easy to use interface. You can add redirects in no-time.

Get a clear overview

The interface will also provide a clear overview of all your added redirects and the incoming hits from the overview page.

Centralize all your domains

With our redirecting tool, your new domains obtained from the merge will be centralized in a singular location.

Use extensive analytics

By using our extensive analytics tool, you can easily get an idea of which brands domains are most popular.