Migrating a site without losing what it took years to earn

Before you touch anything

1. Crawl the existing site and export every URL that returns 200. This list is the migration.
2. Export Search Console performance data for the last 16 months — after migration you cannot get the old data back in the same shape.
3. Record current rankings for your top 20 terms, so "did it work" has an answer that is not a feeling.
4. Export the backlink profile. The pages with links are the ones whose redirects matter most.
5. Note current indexed page count. A large drop afterwards is the earliest reliable warning sign.

The redirect map is the project

Every old URL maps to the single most equivalent new URL. Not to the home page — mass redirects to the root are treated as soft 404s and throw away exactly the equity you were trying to preserve.

Where no equivalent exists, decide deliberately: redirect to the closest parent category, or return 410 Gone and accept the loss. Both are legitimate. Silence is not.

• One hop only. Chains bleed equity and slow crawling; http → https → www → final is three hops doing one job.
• 301 permanent, not 302, unless the move genuinely is temporary.
• Test the map before launch against the full URL export, not against a sample.
• Keep the redirects for at least a year. Removing them at six months undoes the migration.

Launch day sequence

1. Deploy the new site with redirects live and verified
2. Confirm robots.txt is not the staging version — this is the single most common launch-day catastrophe
3. Check a sample of old URLs resolve in one hop to the right new URL
4. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
5. For a domain change, use the Search Console Change of Address tool — it does not replace redirects, it supplements them
6. Verify the new property in Search Console and Bing before you need the data
7. Update every canonical, Open Graph URL and structured-data @id to the new domain

The 90 days afterwards

Expect a dip. A well-executed migration usually recovers within four to eight weeks; a poorly executed one does not recover on its own. What separates them is whether anyone is watching.

• Coverage report weekly: crawl errors, redirect errors, and pages that fell out of the index
• 404 log weekly, because your redirect map was not as complete as you thought
• Rankings for the recorded top 20, tracked against the pre-migration baseline
• Referring domains, in case a major linking site redirected to something unexpected
• Core Web Vitals on the new stack, which is frequently different and occasionally worse

Migrating off a free host or subdomain

A special and much simpler case: when the old URL has no rankings, no traffic history and no links, there is nothing to preserve. Move today. The migration cost only rises from here, as more business cards, CVs, profiles and invoices carry the old address.

The one thing still worth doing is a blanket 301 from the old host to the new domain, so anything that does point at the old URL follows you rather than disappearing.

Questions people ask about this

How long does a migration dip last?

Typically two to eight weeks for a well-executed move on an established site. If nothing has recovered after three months, something is broken — usually redirect chains, a stray noindex, or a robots.txt copied from staging.

Can I redirect everything to the home page?

No. Google treats mass redirects to the root as soft 404s, so you keep none of the equity. Map to the closest equivalent page or return 410.

Should I change domain and redesign at the same time?

Ideally not. If both change together and traffic drops, you cannot tell which caused it. If you must combine them, keep the URL structure identical so the redirect map stays trivial.

Who wrote this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. The examples in these guides come from those builds and from the audit that rebuilt this site, not from a content brief. More about how I work, or read the case studies.