07/06/19 // Written by Samantha Beckham

Preparing Your Website For Brexit

Today Theresa May has officially stepped down from her position of Conservative Party Leader and will soon step down as Prime Minister in July, leaving the UK with an even bigger feeling of uncertainty around the implications of Brexit. Although we cannot ignore the sense of unpredictability in the air, whether we have a second referendum or a no-deal Brexit, one thing is for certain: if you have a .eu domain name, you will need to act fast.

How will Brexit impact your website domain?

If you can prove your business meets the regulatory requirements to have a .eu domain, then you don’t need to panic. However, if your business does not meet these regulations, you will need to register for a new Top Level Domain such as “.com”, “.co.uk” or “.London” and run a website migration. If you don’t, you could be running the risk of losing your domain name to new registrants within the EEA. This will not only cause a negative impact on your SEO ranking but could potentially affect your brand reputation too.

What do you need to do?

The uncertainty surrounding Brexit is inevitably affecting businesses, but the more you can do to protect yourself – whatever the outcome – the smoother the transition will be. A website migration is necessary to move a website to a new URL and redirect the old site.

There are some cases where businesses have failed to successfully migrate a website, resulting in unrecoverable SEO repercussions. These rare instances have created a myth around the process which causes a lot of anxiety in the boardroom when someone utters the word “migration”.

Although the process isn’t simple, website migrations shouldn’t be feared. Whilst there have been instances where migration has negatively impacted rankings, it is usually because the migration has been done badly. If anything, migration is a welcome business opportunity – especially in the case of Brexit. When completed to best practice, your new website should see a zero loss in search rankings and, in most of our client instances, you could even see an increase in organic traffic post-migration. 

One of our clients is an independent, family owned business with over 160 years in the jewellery market. With over 118 stores and a strong online presence, this eCommerce client wanted to migrate to a new website and improve overall organic performance as their site had been underperforming on previous months.​ Our team of SEO experts devised and implemented a comprehensive redirect plan and pre-migration checks which resulted in a: 

  • 25% increase in keywords top 20 
  • 12% increase in year on year (YoY) organic traffic after migration 
  • 53% increase in organic visibility.
Organic traffic
SEO visibility
SEO visibility

Hopefully busting this myth around migration has settled some fears you may have. It is advisable to start the process of migration as soon as you can, giving you the best opportunity to set up your redirects and marketing activities in ample time ahead of the new Brexit deadline, 31 October 2019.

If you are a business that has a .eu domain and need to migrate before a decision is made around Brexit, then contact us today. Our SEO team will be more than happy to discuss the best strategy for you to successfully migrate your website.