I Just Hired a New Website Provider—Now What?

The 8 Essential Rules for a Seamless Website Transition

This session, originally presented by C-4 Analytics on the Digital Dealer platform, walked through the critical process of managing a website transition. The following eight rules are essential to ensure you propel your dealership forward without squandering your hard-earned digital assets.

The most important truth in this transition is that only you truly care about the outcome. A website change is complex, and you must be your own advocate to ensure business continuity.

The 8 Rules That Must Be Followed

Failing to manage these off-site and back-end issues can be devastating, leading to lost sales, broken ad campaigns, and a drop in SEO rankings. Demand verification of every item on this checklist from your new partner.

1. Transfer Relevant SEO Content

   • The Risk: New platforms may deploy templated content, sacrificing your hard-earned organic rank.

   • The Action: Demand that all of your existing, custom, highly-optimized content (like Why Buy, YFinance, and YService pages) is migrated to the new platform. If you were previously on boilerplate text, now is the time to write unique content.

2. Create a Proper 301 Redirect Map

   • The Risk: Many providers only redirect your top 10 pages, ignoring the hundreds of other URLs on your sitemap. This makes it impossible for Google crawlers to find the new pages, leading to ranking loss.

   • The Action: Insist the new provider creates a 301 redirect map for all relevant old page addresses to their corresponding new URLs.

3. Protect Historical Data

   • The Risk: New providers often create new Google Analytics (GA) accounts, costing you access to historical data needed to gauge future campaign success.

   • The Action: Ensure you retain access to your old GA data. Migrate all analytics tags and set up proper new analytics goals on the new platform.

4. Reverify Google Search Console

   • The Risk: The verification for your Google Search Console account does not automatically transfer when you switch platforms.

   • The Action: Confirm that the new site is reverified with the Search Console to maintain communication with Google about indexing and site health.

5. Update Destination URLs in Paid Ads

   • The Risk: Most URL structures are not one-to-one between platforms. If your paid ads still point to the old URLs, customers will land on a 404 "Page Not Found" error, wasting ad spend and losing leads.

   • The Action: Verify that every destination URL within your Paid Search (SEM) campaigns is updated to match the new site’s structure.

6. Correct Call Tracking Numbers

   • The Risk: If your previous website provider also supplied your call tracking numbers, those numbers may be recycled after you leave. This could lead to customers calling your old numbers and being routed to another dealership.

   • The Action: Perform a local listing sweep (SuperPages, Foursquare, etc.) of all 39+ business directories to ensure your correct, current, and consistent tracking numbers are posted.

7. Host Your Email

   • The Risk: Email hosting can easily be bungled during the technical transfer, potentially causing a loss of email continuity and compromising sensitive information.

   • The Action: Hold your new provider accountable for the seamless migration of email hosting.

8. Confirm Lead Routing is Up to Date

   • The Risk: If lead routing is not properly confirmed, lead submissions from your website may fail to reach your CRM—the lifeblood of your dealership.

   • The Action: Verify that leads are being properly and completely rerouted at every step of the website transfer process.

Your Accountability is Key

The success of this transition rests on your shoulders. These eight items are your punch list. Because of the inherent complexity, it is wise to either demand written confirmation for each of these items from your new provider or consider bringing in an experienced, vendor-neutral partner to oversee the process. You can't gather back lost data or organic rank after the fact—so get it right the first time.

Watch the Full Webinar

For a deeper dive into these topics and to hear directly from Rob Stoesser, Vice President of Sales, watch the full webinar below.