A new platform, a redesign or a new domain is the moment a website is most likely to lose years of search visibility in a single day. Most of that loss is avoidable. I plan migrations URL by URL, so the rankings and traffic your site has earned move across with it.
Migrations lose traffic in one of two ways: URLs that went nowhere, and URLs that all went to the homepage.
Why sites lose traffic after a migration
Sites usually lose traffic after a migration because old URLs stop working, redirects are missing or point to the wrong pages, or content, metadata and internal links don’t carry across to the new site. Google has to rediscover everything, and pages it can’t match to their old versions start again from nothing.
The damage often isn’t visible on launch day. The new site looks great, the team celebrates, and a fortnight later Search Console shows clicks sliding and 404 errors climbing. By then the fix is harder, because Google has already recrawled the broken versions.
Google’s own guidance on site moves with URL changes sets out the basics: map old URLs to new ones, add server-side redirects, and update internal links and sitemaps. The detail in doing that properly is where migrations succeed or fail.
What a proper migration covers
Every migration I work on follows the same core process, adapted to the platform:
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| URL inventory | Every URL that matters, from a full crawl, Search Console and analytics, including pages that sit outside the main structure and are easy to miss |
| Redirect map | A confirmed destination for every old URL, checked for chains, loops and missing targets |
| Templates and metadata | Titles, descriptions, headings, canonicals, hreflang and schema carried across or improved |
| Content and internal links | Content that ranks kept intact, and internal links pointed at the new URLs rather than through redirects |
| Sitemaps | XML sitemaps built for the new platform, listing only live, indexable URLs |
| Pre-launch checks | The staging site tested against the redirect map and technical checklist before anything goes live |
| Launch day | Redirects tested live, sitemaps submitted, errors watched |
| Recovery tracking | Search Console checked until rankings and clicks settle |
Developer briefs come one issue per brief, so the build team can work straight from them.
Signs a migration is going wrong
Most migration problems show up in Google Search Console within days, if someone’s looking. The warning signs to watch for after launch are:
- 404 errors rising in the page indexing report
- old URLs still showing in search results weeks after launch
- clicks falling on pages that used to perform well, while the new URLs aren’t picking them up
- pages dropping out of the index, or being marked as duplicates
- a sitemap that’s missing, or listing URLs that redirect
Catching these in the first fortnight usually means a quick fix. Catching them after three months means a recovery project.
Migration services
| Service | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Magento migrations | Magento 1 and 2, replatforming off Magento, product and category URLs, layered navigation |
| Magento to Shopify | Mapping categories to collections and products to Shopify’s fixed URL structure |
| Shopify migrations | Theme changes, store moves, and headless builds on Hydrogen with a separate CMS |
| WordPress migrations | Moving to or from WordPress, permalink changes, plugins, SEO data and hosting moves |
| Redesigns and relaunches | Protecting rankings through a redesign on the same platform |
| Domain and URL structure changes | Rebrands, domain moves, and subfolder or subdomain decisions |
| Migration traffic recovery | Finding what went wrong after a migration and getting traffic back |
Migrations I’ve worked on
- Evewell: a pre-migration SEO audit for a London fertility clinic’s full WordPress redesign, with a 207-URL redirect map, a proposed site structure and developer and content briefs for every stage of the build
- Kwiat: a New York jeweller’s move to headless Shopify on Hydrogen with a Sanity CMS, including a sitemap built to specification
Talk to the person doing the work
There is no account manager here and no team to be handed to. If you get in touch, it is me who reads it, me who looks at your site, and me who does the work if we go ahead.
Get in touch, or start with a free assessment.
How the work gets done
The site audit system builds the URL inventory and technical baseline, the sitemap toolkit generates and validates the new sitemaps, and the Search Console audit tool tracks recovery after launch. Every redirect in the map is checked by me before it goes to your developer.
The step-by-step version is in the site migration checklist, and why sites lose traffic after a migration goes into the causes in more detail.
When to get in touch
As early as possible. The decisions that protect rankings, such as URL structure, templates and which content stays, are made in planning, and they’re far cheaper to get right before the build than to fix after launch. If the move has already happened and traffic has dropped, the traffic recovery service is where to start.
Get in touch with your launch date and platform, or ask for a free assessment of your current site first.
FAQ
When should SEO get involved in a website migration?
Before the new site is designed, ideally. URL structure, templates and content decisions made early decide whether rankings survive, and they’re much cheaper to get right in planning than to fix after launch. At the very least, SEO should review the redirect map and staging site before anything goes live.
Will I lose rankings when I move to a new website?
Some movement in the first few weeks is normal while Google processes the redirects and recrawls the new pages. Lasting losses usually come from missing or wrong redirects, lost content or broken internal links. A complete URL map and proper pre-launch checks are what stop a temporary wobble becoming a permanent drop.
How long should redirects stay in place after a migration?
Keep them permanently where you can. Old URLs keep getting visits from links, bookmarks and search results for years. Google’s site move guidance recommends keeping redirects for as long as possible, and removing them later throws away the value those old URLs built up.
Can I redesign and change platform at the same time?
You can, but it raises the risk because two things change at once, which makes it harder to tell what caused any drop. If both have to happen together, the redirect map, content decisions and pre-launch checks matter even more, and recovery tracking needs to start on launch day.