SEO website
migration

Why migrations go wrong

A website relaunch is usually planned by people who care about how the new site looks. That is fair: you're paying for a better site. The trouble is that Google doesn't see the design. It sees addresses, content and links, and a redesign tends to change all three at once. Old URLs disappear, text gets trimmed to fit a cleaner layout, and internal links point somewhere new. To Google, the familiar site has vanished and a stranger has moved in.

An SEO website migration is a plan that keeps Google's understanding of your site intact through the move. It isn't complicated, but it is detailed, and the details are easy to skip under deadline pressure.

The URL map is the whole job

The core document is a spreadsheet with two columns: every old URL that matters, and the new URL it should redirect to. "Matters" means the page had organic traffic, ranked for something, had links from other sites or was used in ads or emails. I collect those from Search Console, GA4, a crawl of the old site and backlink data.

Rules I follow when filling it in:

• each old page redirects to its closest equivalent, not to the homepage;
• pages with no equivalent get one, if they earned traffic, or redirect to the most relevant parent page;
• redirects are one hop, never chains;
• the map is tested on the staging site before launch, not after.

Content that carried your rankings

The most damaging decision in many redesigns is cutting content. A service page that ranked with 600 words of specific information becomes a hero image and two sentences. Before anything is removed, I check which pages and sections bring traffic, and those keep their substance, rewritten if needed but not gutted. The website SEO work on page structure often happens at the same time.

Launch day and the weeks after

On launch day I go through a fixed checklist: redirects respond with 301, no noindex or robots.txt blocks, sitemap submitted, canonical tags correct, structured data valid, GA4 and conversion tags firing, forms and call links working on a phone. Then the monitoring begins. For the first weeks I check Search Console coverage and 404 reports several times a week and fix anything that slipped through the same day.

A temporary dip is normal. Google needs time to recrawl and process redirects. With a clean migration, rankings typically recover within weeks.

Platform changes and domain changes

Moving from a page builder to a hand-coded site or a custom CMS usually changes URL patterns, which is exactly where redirects matter most. Changing the domain adds another layer: redirect every page, verify both domains in Search Console, file a Change of Address and keep the old domain renewed. If you're also rebranding, update every listing on Google Business Profile, Yelp and the BBB at the same time.

When I build the new site myself, as a website redesign or a full rebuild, the migration is part of the project, not an extra. If another developer builds it, I can plan and check the SEO side. Either way, technical SEO and migration overlap heavily, and the guide to redesigning without losing rankings explains the steps for owners who want to follow along.

One more thing: keep the old site

Before launch, I take a full crawl and save a copy of the old site's content and URL list. If something goes missing weeks later, there is a record of what was there, which makes recovery much faster than guessing.