How To Test Your Migrated WordPress Site

So, you’ve finally migrated your WordPress website, all the data has been transferred, and everything went smoothly.

Or did it?

As many experienced WordPress users will undoubtedly attest to, there are all kinds of website migration problems that could occur, the impact of which may not be immediately apparent.

This is why it’s so essential to properly test your migrated WordPress site, running a comprehensive website audit to ensure you’re still delivering the same quality experience for your users.

In this guide, we’ll talk you step-by-step through the testing process and show you all the factors you need to look into before you’re confident the move was 100% successful.

How To Test Your Migrated WordPress Site in 6 Easy Steps:

1. Check The Website is Loading and Accessible

Before you can dive any deeper into your post-migration testing, you need to be sure you’ve got a website to test to begin with.

So, start by firing up your browser and loading your website’s homepage.

Does it load smoothly with zero errors or delays?

Are assets such as graphics, photos, and interactive elements present? If so, do they load quickly?

Move through the most important pages and ask the same questions.

If your answer is a resounding yes, you can move on to the next part of the testing process.

If it’s not, our guide to troubleshooting common WordPress migration issues will help identify the causes and solutions of the problems you’re facing.

2. Test Your Links

Once you’ve established that your website’s main entry points are all present, correct, and fully operational, you’ll need to dive deeper into the rest of your site, hunting down any broken links and checking your site navigation is intact.

If you’ve just migrated a large website, you might find it easier to hand this job over to a tool like the Ahrefs Broken Link Checker.

Add your site, and you’ll get a complete breakdown of any links on your site that are producing 404 errors.

If there are a ton of them, a likely cause may simply be a case of an incorrect permalink structure.

To test if that’s the case, go to Settings – Permalinks from your WordPress dashboard.

Once there, check if the permalink structure is different from the structure of the URLS, causing 404 errors.

For example, if your structure is set to Month and Name, but the broken URLs are set to Day and Name, there’s your problem.

Simply switch the permalink structure to that of your currently-broken URLs, and they shouldn’t be broken any longer.

Another probable cause of 404 errors is that certain pages or resources got lost during the data transfer process, which is why we always recommend creating a backup of your WordPress site before migrating so that you can quickly and easily replace missing files.

3. Test Your Site Structure and Navigation

So, you’re confident that all your pages are at least live and accessible on your website, but are they correctly organized and arranged within your site structure?

It’s not too uncommon for WordPress migrations to cause posts to lose their categories and tags or otherwise become mislabeled.

Likewise, we’ve seen more than our fair share of navigational menus gone askew post-migration.

As such, it’s a good idea to pay attention to both navigational structure and content organization to ensure everything is exactly where it should be.

4. Check The Site is Fully Functional

Next, focus on testing the functionality of your website’s core features so that you can be confident users can interact with your site exactly as you intended.

Go through your website performing any actions you’d want users to take, such as filling in forms or clicking your CTA buttons.

If you’ve just migrated an eCommerce site, make a test purchase to ensure everything from adding products to the cart to completing a transaction can be done without problems.

If you run a site where users can sign up as members, test the registration, login, and account management processes.

Of course, you don’t just need to test all this from a user’s perspective. You also need to be sure that you’re receiving any data from users and that said data is still secure.

In other words, are you receiving responses to your signup forms?

Are eCommerce payments landing in your account?

Is data being properly synchronized with any third-party marketing or analytics plugins you might be using?

5. Run Speed and Performance Tests

Improving page load speeds is one of the main reasons many WordPress users migrate to a new server in the first place.

If that’s the case for you, you’ll want to be sure that all the trouble was worth it.

Of course, in a perfect world, there’d be no reason why running the same site on a better server wouldn’t make it load faster, but isn’t it worth checking out just to be sure?

To run this test effectively, use tools like Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights to check the page speed of your site on the old server before migration, and then check the speeds on the new server post-migration and compare the two.

Ideally, you’ll see an improvement or, at the very least, comparably similar speeds.

If not, it’s time to investigate why and implement recommended solutions.

That said, even if your page does perform better on the new server, running page speed tests may reveal some valuable opportunities to improve it further.

6. Test Mobile Responsiveness

It may not make a great deal of sense to consider that simply moving a website to a new server could affect whether or not it’s mobile-friendly; it does happen from time to time.

With that in mind, the final test of your migrated WordPress site needs involves using tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to ensure your website still loads, looks, and functions correctly on all devices.

How to Test Your Migrated WordPress Site: Key Takeaways

If there’s one thing we hope you’ve learned in this guide, it’s that testing your migrated WordPress site is vital for ensuring there are no lingering problems affecting your ability to provide your visitors with a top-class user experience.

To recap pricelessly what to look for in your post-migration WordPress testing, here’s the three key lessons to take away from this article:

• Never assume a migration is 100% successful – At least not until you’ve thoroughly tested that every page, blog post, and resource is online, accessible, and functions as it should.

• Remember to test both the front-end and back-end of site functions – Not only do you need to make sure visitors can use your site forms, eCommerce features, and other interactive tools, you all need to check that you still receive all relevant customer data from those features.

• Technical SEO auditing is especially important after a WordPress migration – With site speed and mobile usability having a major impact on your website’s success, it’s important to check your newly migrated site is scoring top marks in both.

See our top tips for a seamless WordPress migration to ensure your site passes every test on its new server.