How to Swap SSD and Reboot With a Back-Up Image of Original

I recently got a new Lenovo 13 with middle of the road specs and am upgrading the RAM and storage.

The RAM was a breeze and no problem.

The storage on the other hand is worrying me. I am pretty novice and need some advice on how to go about swapping the SSD. From other posts I concluded that I want to make a back-up image of the current SSD and use that to reboot the new one once installed.

So my question is how do I go about doing this. I understand how to make a back-up image onto an external drive, but beyond that am not entirely sure what to do.

Do I need to make a recovery disk? And if so can it be a bootable USB because the Lenovo 13 doesn't have a disk drive.

Would really appreciate a step-by-step run down of how to do this, or a link to something along those lines.

Thanks for any advice.

 

I usually use Macrium reflect Free to image the whole disk to an external HDD, create a recovery disk( CD/USB), install the SSD and boot with the recovery disk created, recover the image from my earlier backup.
http://www.macrium.com/webtutorial/tutorial.asp
You need to change the boot order in BIOS settings to USB as the first boot after creating the backup. Install your new SSD.
Insert the USB drive(recovery) , connect your external disk and recover the image on to the new SSD.

 

Deleted, double post.