Every guide we have written on moving a website

Website Migration Guide

Twenty-five guides covering the whole job, from working out whether you should move at all to fixing it when the rankings drop. Written in the order a migration actually happens.

25 guidesPlanningRedirectsTelling GooglePlatform MovesRecovery
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25 guides
Six stages
Written by people who do this

A site migration is the one job in SEO where doing nothing is safer than doing it badly. Move a website carelessly and you can lose years of accumulated rankings in a weekend, then spend six months getting them back. Move it properly and nobody outside the business ever notices it happened. These guides cover the difference. If you are migrating soon, read the planning guide plus the checklist before anybody touches anything.

Start Here

What Is a Site Migration?

The entry point for everything else here. What actually counts as a migration, why the word covers half a dozen quite different jobs, what changes underneath when a site moves plus why search engines treat it as a bigger event than most people expect. If you are not certain whether what you are planning even counts as a migration, this is the page that answers it.

Read the explainer
Before you decide anything

Understanding It

Migration is a single word covering jobs that have very little in common. Changing domain is not the same as changing platform, which is not the same as restructuring URLs on a site that otherwise stays exactly where it is.

What they share is that search engines have to work out that the new thing is the old thing. These three guides establish what you are actually doing plus whether you should be doing it at all.

Six Jobs, One Word

What Are the Different Types of Site Migration?

Domain moves, platform moves, HTTP to HTTPS, CMS changes, URL restructures plus subdomain to root. Covers all six in one place, since the risks and the work differ enormously between them.

Covers all six types Read the guide → Sometimes The Answer Is No

When Should You Migrate a Website?

The reasons that justify the risk plus the reasons that do not. A rebrand, an acquisition or a platform that genuinely cannot do what you need are all good reasons. Wanting a tidier URL structure usually is not.

The decision, before the project Read the guide →
The stage that decides whether it goes well

Before You Start

Almost every migration that goes wrong went wrong here rather than on launch day. The work that protects a site is unglamorous: knowing what you currently have, recording how it currently performs plus deciding in advance where every single URL is going to land.

Skip this stage and you will not even be able to tell how much damage you have done, because you will have nothing to compare against.

Read This One First

How to Plan a Site Migration Without Losing Rankings

The full sequence, who needs to be involved, what has to be finished before anything goes live plus the two questions everybody asks: how long it takes and when in the year to do it.

The whole sequence Read the guide → Print It Out

What Is a Site Migration SEO Checklist?

Everything that has to be signed off before launch, during launch plus in the days after. The single most useful page here if a migration is already booked in.

Before, during plus after Read the guide → Where Migrations Are Won

How to Create a URL Mapping for a Site Migration

Every old URL matched to exactly one new URL, decided before launch rather than after. Tedious, unavoidable plus the single document that most often does not exist when something goes wrong.

One row per URL Read the guide → Your Only Reference Point

How to Audit Your Current Site Before Migrating

A full picture of what you have plus how it currently performs, recorded before anything changes. Includes setting the benchmarks you will measure recovery against, because without them nobody can say whether the migration worked.

Audit plus benchmarks Read the guide →
The seven jobs that have to be right

The Technical Work

This is the largest group here because it is where the actual work sits. Redirects, links, tags, crawling, structured data plus performance all have to survive the move, plus each one fails differently.

Redirects get the most attention plus the others break just as many migrations. A site that redirects perfectly and then blocks itself in robots.txt has still lost.

The Load-Bearing Job

How to Implement 301 Redirects for a Site Migration

How to do them, why permanent rather than temporary matters, plus what actually happens to link equity when Google follows one. The page most people arrive here looking for.

Includes 301 against 302 Read the guide → Quietly Expensive

How to Handle Internal Links During a Site Migration

Links pointing at old addresses still work through the redirects, plus they leak a little at every hop and they signal a site that was moved rather than rebuilt. Updating them is a build-time job, not an afterthought.

Update them, do not rely on redirects Read the guide → Easy To Leave Pointing Backwards

How to Manage Canonical Tags During a Site Migration

Canonicals left pointing at the old domain are one of the most common post-launch faults we find. Also covers hreflang, which fails the same way on international sites plus is far harder to spot.

Canonicals plus hreflang Read the guide → The Launch Window

How to Migrate a Website Without Downtime

Sequencing the switch so the site is never unreachable, what to do about DNS propagation plus how to handle the hours when some visitors see the old site and some see the new one.

Launch day, hour by hour Read the guide → Getting Seen Quickly

How to Handle Crawl Budget During a Site Migration

A migration asks search engines to recrawl an entire site at once. This covers how to help that happen, along with sitemaps plus the robots.txt file that has quietly blocked more launches than any other single file.

Crawl, sitemaps plus robots.txt Read the guide → Frequently Lost In The Move

How to Handle Structured Data and Schema During a Site Migration

Schema rarely survives a platform change intact, plus its absence is invisible on the page. Losing review markup or product data quietly costs you the results features you had.

Invisible when it breaks Read the guide → A New Platform Is Not A Faster One

How to Manage Page Speed During a Site Migration

New builds are frequently slower than what they replaced. Covers what to measure before and after plus the mobile considerations that decide most of it, since that is where the traffic is.

Speed plus mobile Read the guide →
The part you cannot rush

Telling Google

You cannot make search engines process a migration faster, though you can make sure they have everything they need plus you can know what a normal timescale looks like.

These two guides matter most in the fortnight after launch, when somebody senior is asking why the traffic has not come back yet.

Do All Of It, In Order

How to Notify Google of a Site Migration

Search Console during the move, the change of address tool plus submitting the new sitemap. Three jobs people do one of and assume they have done all three.

Three steps, not one Read the guide → Manage The Expectation

How Long Does Google Take to Process a Site Migration?

What is normal, what is slow plus what genuinely indicates a problem. Worth reading before launch rather than during the panic, so the timeline is agreed with everybody in advance.

Read it before you launch Read the guide →
Five specific moves, each with its own traps

Platform Moves

The general advice covers most of it, plus every platform pairing has quirks that catch people out: how URLs are structured, what the exporter does and does not bring across, which redirects the new platform will actually let you set.

If you know which move you are making, read the specific guide alongside the planning one rather than instead of it.

Leaving WordPress

How to Migrate From WordPress to Another CMS Without Losing Rankings

What tends to break when a large WordPress site moves elsewhere, plus which of its structures have to be reproduced rather than redesigned.

Platform move Read the guide → Ecommerce

How to Migrate a Shopify Store Without Losing SEO

Product URLs, collections, variants plus the redirect rules a store needs. Ecommerce migrations carry more URLs than any other kind, which makes the mapping work considerably larger.

Platform move Read the guide → Common Pairing

How to Migrate From Squarespace to WordPress Without Losing Rankings

One of the moves we are asked about most, usually when a site has outgrown what it was built on. Covers the URL differences plus what has to be rebuilt rather than exported.

Platform move Read the guide → Common Pairing

How to Migrate a Wix Website to WordPress

What comes across cleanly, what does not plus the redirect handling this particular move requires. Another one people usually attempt once and then ask for help with.

Platform move Read the guide → Large Ecommerce

How to Handle a Magento to Shopify Migration for SEO

The largest and riskiest move in this list, since Magento catalogues tend to be big plus the URL structures differ substantially. Worth planning over months rather than weeks.

Platform move Read the guide →
Launch day is the middle, not the end

After It Goes Live

Most of what goes wrong in a migration becomes visible in the weeks afterwards rather than on the day. Something drops, nobody is sure whether it is normal, plus by the time it is investigated properly a month has gone.

These four cover watching it properly, knowing what a normal dip looks like, finding what actually broke plus the mistakes worth knowing about before you make them.

Watch It Properly

How to Monitor Rankings After a Site Migration

What to check daily in the first fortnight, what to check weekly after that plus how to tell a genuine loss from a temporary wobble. Includes tracking traffic drops and what a normal ranking dip looks like.

Daily, then weekly Read the guide → The Reassurance Question

How Long Does It Take to Recover Rankings After a Site Migration?

What a normal recovery curve looks like plus at what point a dip stops being normal and starts being a fault. The page to send to whoever is asking why the numbers are down.

When to worry, when not to Read the guide → When It Has Gone Wrong

How to Identify Redirect Errors After a Site Migration

Finding what actually broke, fixing broken links plus recovering a migration that has already gone badly. If rankings have dropped and you do not know why, start here.

Diagnosis plus recovery Read the guide → Read It Before, Not After

Common Site Migration Mistakes That Destroy Rankings

Why migrations fail, what not to do, how backlinks get lost plus why redirect chains cause damage that is hard to trace. The most useful page here if you have not migrated yet.

Four failure modes Read the guide →
Migrating soon, else already gone wrong

Talk To Us Before You Move It.

We plan and run migrations, plus we pick up the ones that went badly. Either way the conversation starts the same: what you have now, where it is going plus what has to survive the move. If you are already through it and the numbers have dropped, we will tell you what actually happened.

What we would look at:

Audit and benchmarks Full URL mapping Redirects and internal links Tags, schema and sitemaps Launch sequencing Post-launch monitoring
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Using these guides

Frequently Asked

Where should I start if I am migrating soon?
Read the planning guide and the checklist first, then URL mapping. Those three cover the work that actually protects a site, plus all three have to be done before anybody builds anything. If you are moving between two specific platforms, read that guide alongside them rather than instead of them.
My rankings have already dropped. Where do I go?
Start with how long rankings take to recover, since a proportion of what looks like damage is a normal dip that resolves on its own. If it goes beyond that, redirect errors after migration covers finding what actually broke plus recovering from it. Do not start rebuilding things before you know what the fault is, because that usually makes the diagnosis harder.
Which stage do most migrations go wrong at?
Before launch, almost always, though it does not become visible until afterwards. The audit that was not done, the benchmarks nobody recorded plus the URL mapping that was half finished are what turn a routine move into a six-month recovery. Launch day gets the attention because that is when it becomes obvious, plus by then the decisions that mattered were made weeks earlier.
Do I need to read all twenty-five?
No. The six groups follow the order a migration actually happens, so read the stage you are at plus the one after it. Understanding It and Before You Start matter to everybody. The Technical Work matters if you are doing it yourself. Platform Moves only if you are making that specific move. After It Goes Live is worth reading before launch rather than during the panic.
Should I migrate at all?
Frequently the answer is no, plus when should you migrate a website covers it properly. A rebrand, an acquisition or a platform that genuinely cannot do what the business needs are all sound reasons. Wanting tidier URLs, perhaps a redesign that could be done in place, generally is not. A migration is the one job in SEO where doing nothing is safer than doing it badly.
Can you just do it for us?
Yes, plus that is usually the cheaper option once you count the cost of getting it wrong. We plan and run migrations, plus we also pick up the ones that have already gone badly. Either way the first conversation is the same: what you have now, where it is going plus what has to survive the move. Get in touch and we will tell you plainly whether it is a job you can handle in house.