Nov 14, 2025
Site migration without losing SEO: 7 steps
Plan a site migration without losing SEO by auditing current performance, mapping every URL to its 301 redirect destination, preserving all on-page elements, testing in staging, updating Search Console at launch, monitoring rankings daily for 30 days, and fixing issues within 48 hours. Poor planning causes 10-20% traffic loss in month one; missed redirects push that to 40-60%
Audit current SEO performance first
You can’t measure what broke if you don’t know what worked before launch. Start by documenting everything Google cares about.
Export your top 500 landing pages by organic traffic from Google Analytics. Note their current rankings for primary keywords, monthly sessions, and average position in Search Console. Grab a full crawl with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to capture title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, and canonical tags.
Download your backlink profile from Ahrefs or Semrush. Focus on links to your top 100 pages, since those drive most of your organic value. If a high-authority site links to /old-product-page, you need that URL in your redirect map.
A SaaS company migrated 2,400 pages without documenting pre-launch metrics. Three weeks later, traffic was down 34%, but they couldn’t pinpoint which pages or keywords tanked. Compare that to an ecommerce brand that baselined everything. When rankings dipped 12% in week two, they traced it to 40 product pages with broken canonical tags. Fixed in 48 hours, rankings recovered within ten days.
Takeaway: Baseline your rankings, traffic sources, and top landing pages so you can measure what actually changed post-launch.
Map URLs and set up 301 redirects
Every public-facing URL needs a destination. Miss one redirect and you’ve created a 404 that kills rankings overnight.
Start with your sitemap and crawl data. Export every URL that’s currently indexed or receiving backlinks. Then map each old URL to its exact new equivalent. Use a comprehensive website migration checklist to capture every public-facing URL, including product pages, blog posts, category archives, tag pages, and any legacy content still receiving backlinks or organic traffic.
People forget about pagination URLs (/blog/page/2/), filtered views (/products?color=blue), old campaign landing pages, and regional subfolders. One hospitality brand migrated and forgot about 180 location-specific landing pages that drove 15% of total organic sessions. Three weeks post-launch, they noticed the traffic crater and had to scramble to add redirects retroactively.
Every old URL should redirect to one new URL with equivalent content. /old-blog-post goes to /new-blog-post, not to your homepage. Follow Google’s redirect guidelines which explicitly recommend one-to-one 301 redirects for preserving PageRank and avoiding dilution across multiple destination pages.
Set up redirects at the server level (Apache .htaccess, Nginx config, or Cloudflare rules), not via JavaScript or meta refresh tags. Google crawls faster and trusts server-side 301s more.
A redirect chain happens when URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects to URL C. Each hop loses 5-10% of link equity. Check your staging environment for chains before launch. Tools like Screaming Frog flag multi-hop redirects automatically. Fix them by pointing A directly to C.
Takeaway: Build a complete redirect map before touching DNS and implement one-to-one 301 redirects to preserve link equity.
Preserve on-page SEO elements exactly
Your new CMS might have different field names or templates, but Google expects to see the same signals it saw before.
Title tags must stay identical or very close. If your old page ranked for “best coffee grinders 2024” with the title “10 Best Coffee Grinders for 2024,” don’t change it to “Top Coffee Machines.” Google interprets that as a different topic.
Meta descriptions don’t directly affect rankings but influence click-through rates. Keep them unless you’re fixing obvious problems. Same with heading structure (H1, H2, H3). If your old page had an H1 of “Coffee Grinder Buying Guide,” your new page needs that exact H1.
If your old site used Product schema, Review schema, or FAQ schema, replicate it exactly on the new site. Losing rich snippets in search results tanks click-through rates even if rankings stay stable. Test your structured data in Google’s Rich Results Test tool before launch.
Internal links distribute PageRank across your site. If your old page had 50 internal links and the new version has 5, you’ve just told Google that page is less important. An ecommerce brand preserved rankings by creating 1:1 redirects for 800+ product URLs and updating internal links in staging before launch.
Alt text helps rankings for image search and provides context for visually impaired users. If your old product images had descriptive alt text, keep that exact text. Don’t let your new CMS auto-generate generic alt text like “image_1234.jpg.”
Takeaway: Title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, schema markup, and internal links must survive the move intact.
Test everything in staging first
Launch day is not the time to discover your redirects don’t work. Staging environments exist to catch disasters before customers see them.
Crawl your staging site with Screaming Frog set to follow redirects. Check that every old URL redirects to the correct new URL with a 301 status code. Look for 404s, redirect chains, and redirect loops. Verify canonical tags point to the correct URLs and aren’t accidentally pointing back to the old domain.
Run a full audit with a tool like Sitebulb or Oncrawl. These tools catch technical SEO issues that manual testing misses: orphaned pages, broken hreflang tags, missing XML sitemaps, duplicate content, and incorrect robots.txt rules.
If you’re managing a complex platform change, follow a structured website migration process that includes staging environment setup, redirect validation, and pre-launch crawl simulation before touching production DNS.
Page speed affects rankings. If your new platform is slower than the old one, you’ll see ranking drops even with perfect redirects. Run Core Web Vitals tests on your top 20 landing pages in staging. Target: LCP under 2.5 seconds, FID under 100ms, CLS under 0.1.
Check that redirects work in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. Test on mobile devices. Some redirect rules break on specific browsers or devices. Better to find out in staging than after launch when mobile users hit 404s.
Takeaway: Catch redirect loops, broken canonical tags, and missing hreflang before launch, not after traffic tanks.
Update Search Console and monitor daily
Search Console is your direct line to Google. Use it the moment your new site goes live.
Add your new domain as a property in Search Console within the first 24 hours. Submit your new XML sitemap. If you’re changing domains entirely (old-site.com to new-site.com), set up both properties and use the Change of Address tool to notify Google officially.
Submit individual high-priority URLs for re-indexing using the URL Inspection tool. Start with your homepage, top 10 landing pages, and any pages with significant backlinks.
Check the Coverage report daily for the first two weeks. Look for 404 errors, redirect errors, and pages blocked by robots.txt. The sooner you catch these, the less ranking damage you’ll see.
Use a rank tracker (Ahrefs, Semrush, or SERanking) to monitor your top 100 keywords daily. Look for sudden drops of 10+ positions. These indicate redirect failures, indexing issues, or content loss.
Configure alerts in Search Console for coverage errors, manual actions, and security issues. Set up rank tracking alerts for any keyword that drops 5+ positions.
Expect small ranking fluctuations (2-5 positions) as Google re-evaluates your site. This is normal. What’s not normal: entire pages disappearing from the index, top keywords dropping from page 1 to page 5, or traffic crashing 30%+ in week one.
61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing organic presence is their top inbound priority (HubSpot, 2024), making migration risk intolerable for most businesses.
Takeaway: Submit new sitemaps and trigger re-indexing within 24 hours, then monitor rankings and errors daily for 30 days.
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Fix issues within 48 hours
Security logs sitting unread in storage won’t save you. Real-time monitoring turns logs into early-warning systems
What to log
Migration problems compound daily. A 404 on day one becomes a ranking drop on day three and a traffic crater by day seven.
Rank issues by impact. A 404 on your homepage is a five-alarm fire. A redirect chain on a tag page with 3 monthly visits is background noise. Fix issues in this order: pages generating revenue, pages with high authority backlinks, pages ranking in top 3 for high-volume keywords, and everything else.
404 errors: Usually caused by missed redirects. Add the redirect immediately and request re-indexing in Search Console.
Redirect chains: Fix by updating the redirect to point directly to the final destination, skipping intermediate hops.
Slow page speed: Often caused by unoptimized images or bloated JavaScript on the new platform. Compress images, enable lazy loading, and minify code.
Missing schema markup: Copy the structured data from your old pages and implement it exactly on the new pages. Test in Google’s Rich Results tool.
That SaaS company with the 34% traffic drop? They missed 180 redirects out of 2,400 URLs. Once identified, they added all 180 redirects in an afternoon. Traffic started recovering within 72 hours and reached 94% of baseline after eight weeks. The damage was containable because they acted fast.
Takeaway: Ranking drops compound daily; prioritize 404s on high-traffic pages and redirect chains immediately.
Track recovery for 90 days
Migration effects aren’t instant. Full ranking stabilization takes 60-90 days as Google re-crawls, re-indexes, and re-evaluates your entire site.
Week 1-2: Small fluctuations (plus or minus 5 positions) as Google discovers your redirects.
Week 3-4: Rankings stabilize for most pages; outliers become obvious.
Week 5-8: Traffic returns to 90-95% of pre-launch baseline if everything went well.
Week 9-12: Full recovery or slight improvement as Google rewards your new technical setup.
Compare current metrics to your pre-launch baseline. Track organic traffic (sessions and users), keyword rankings for top 100 terms, indexed pages count, crawl errors and coverage issues, and conversion rates from organic traffic.
Calculate the cost of traffic loss: if your site generates €50,000 monthly from organic traffic and you lose 30% for three months during a botched migration, that’s €45,000 in lost revenue. Compare that to the €8,000-€15,000 cost of proper migration planning with professional help.
Takeaway: Full ranking stabilization takes 60-90 days; premature celebration masks deeper indexing problems.
“Execute a site migration without losing SEO by auditing current performance, mapping every URL to 301 redirects, preserving on-page elements, testing in staging, updating Search Console at launch, monitoring rankings daily for 30 days, and fixing issues within 48 hours. Poor planning causes 10-20% traffic loss; missed redirects push that to 40-60% (Source: Moz, 2024). Studio Ubique helps teams plan migrations in 4-10 weeks with €8,000-€25,000 budgets to prevent ranking loss.”
Monitoring note
Check monthly how Google’s algorithm updates affect migration best practices. Track changes to redirect handling, indexing speed, and Core Web Vitals impact on rankings. Monitor whether AI search results prioritize recent migration guides over older content. Watch for new tools or Search Console features that simplify redirect validation or speed up re-indexing. If your content stops ranking for “website migration SEO” queries, update with fresh case studies and current Search Console screenshots to restore relevance.
Final thoughts
Site migrations are high-stakes moves. One missed redirect map or forgotten canonical tag can cost months of traffic and tens of thousands in revenue. The protocol isn’t complicated: document everything before you start, map every URL to its destination, preserve on-page elements exactly, test in staging until nothing breaks, launch with Search Console updates ready, monitor obsessively for 30 days, and track recovery for 90.
The difference between a clean migration and a traffic disaster is discipline. The tools are straightforward, the steps are clear, the only variable is whether you skip steps to save time. Don’t.
FAQ
Q: How long does a website migration take without losing SEO?
Planning and execution take 4-10 weeks depending on site size. The actual launch happens in one day, but full ranking recovery takes 60-90 days. Rushing the planning phase to save two weeks often costs you three months of lost traffic on the back end. Budget adequate time for redirect mapping, staging tests, and post-launch monitoring.
Q: What is the most common cause of traffic loss during site migration?
Missed or incorrect 301 redirects account for 70%+ of migration traffic drops. When old URLs return 404 errors or redirect to irrelevant pages, Google treats your content as deleted. Build a complete redirect map covering every indexed URL before launch, and test every redirect in staging to catch errors early.
Q: Do I need to redirect every single URL on my old site?
Yes, redirect every public-facing URL that’s currently indexed or has backlinks. This includes blog posts, product pages, category pages, tag pages, paginated URLs, and old landing pages. Missing even 5% of redirects can cause noticeable traffic loss. Use crawl data and backlink reports to build a complete list.
Q: How quickly will Google re-index my site after migration?
High-authority sites get re-crawled within 24-48 hours. Smaller sites can take 1-2 weeks. Speed up the process by submitting your new sitemap in Search Console immediately after launch and manually requesting indexing for your top 100 pages. Monitor the Coverage report daily to track re-indexing progress.
Q: Can I migrate my site in phases to reduce risk?
Phased migrations work for very large sites (10,000+ pages) where you migrate sections over weeks or months. For most sites under 5,000 pages, a single cutover is simpler and creates fewer technical complications. Partial migrations require careful subdirectory planning and can confuse Google if not executed perfectly. Choose based on your site’s complexity and internal resources.
