A website migration is any change to your URLs, platform, domain or site structure. It is also the single most common way for a business to lose years of accumulated search visibility overnight. The failure mode is nearly always the same: URLs changed and nothing told Google where they went.
What counts as a website migration
- Moving to a new domain
- Redesigning with different URL structures
- Changing platform — WordPress to Shopify, custom to WordPress
- Moving from http to https
- Consolidating or splitting sites
- Restructuring navigation in a way that changes page paths
A pure visual redesign that keeps every URL identical is far lower risk. The danger scales with how many addresses change.
Before you launch
- Crawl the existing site and export every URL. This list is the backbone of the whole migration.
- Export current rankings and top landing pages from Search Console — you cannot prove or diagnose a drop without a baseline.
- Map every old URL to its new equivalent, one by one. Anything with no equivalent maps to the closest relevant page, not the homepage.
- Note which pages carry the most backlinks; those redirects matter most.
- Record current traffic, conversions and Core Web Vitals for comparison.
Launch day
- Put the 301 redirects live at the same moment the new site does
- Remove any noindex tags carried over from staging — check this twice
- Confirm robots.txt allows crawling
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console
- Verify canonical tags point at the new URLs
- Test a sample of old URLs manually and confirm each lands on the right page
Use 301 (permanent) redirects, not 302. A 302 tells search engines the change is temporary, so the old URL is kept and the new one does not fully inherit its standing.
The first month after
| When | Check | What is normal |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1–3 | Crawl for broken links and redirect loops | A handful of fixes |
| Week 1 | Search Console coverage and crawl errors | Some fluctuation in impressions |
| Week 2–4 | Rankings versus baseline | A dip of 10–20%, recovering |
| Week 4–8 | Traffic versus baseline | Back to or above previous levels |
A short dip is normal — Google needs to recrawl and reassess. A dip that is still deepening after four weeks is a signal to investigate rather than wait.
When something goes wrong
- Traffic gone entirely — check for a stray noindex or a robots.txt disallow first
- Specific pages dropped — verify their redirects actually resolve, and in one hop
- Rankings down across the board — compare page speed and content depth against the old site
- Search Console shows 404 spikes — those URLs were missed in the mapping
Keep the old site accessible somewhere for at least a month. When something breaks, being able to compare against the original saves hours of guesswork.
Things that are easy to forget
- Image URLs — image search traffic is real traffic
- PDFs and downloadable files
- Old blog posts and category or tag archives
- Email signature and printed-material links
- Google Business Profile and social profile URLs
- Analytics and tracking codes on the new site
Further reading: When to Redesign Your Website — and How to Do It Safely, Technical SEO Audit: A Checklist You Can Actually Run, and our SEO optimization service. For the official guidance, see Google’s guide to site moves with URL changes.
Frequently asked questions
How long do I keep redirects in place?
At least a year, and ideally permanently. They cost nothing to maintain and old links keep sending traffic for far longer than most people expect.
Will I definitely lose rankings during a migration?
A short-term dip of 10–20% is common even when everything is done correctly. A well-executed migration typically recovers within four to eight weeks. Lasting losses almost always trace back to missing or incorrect redirects.
Should I change my URLs during a redesign?
Only if the current structure is genuinely harmful. Every changed URL is a redirect to maintain and a small amount of risk. If the existing URLs are sensible, keep them.