A client of ours once launched a redesigned site on a Friday evening, feeling great about it. By Tuesday, their phone had stopped ringing. The new site looked sharper, but nobody had mapped the old URLs to the new ones, so roughly 140 pages that used to rank were returning 404 errors. It took about three months of cleanup to recover what a single spreadsheet would have protected.
That’s the thing about website migrations. Moving to a new platform, a new domain, or even a new URL structure is mostly boring, careful work, and the boring parts are exactly what decide whether your search visibility survives. Here’s the process we follow, and why each step matters.
First, Be Clear on What Kind of Migration You’re Doing
“Migration” covers a lot of ground, and the risk differs for each type:
- Platform change (say, Wix to WordPress): URLs often change by accident because the new system formats them differently.
- Domain change (oldbrand.com to newbrand.com): the highest-risk move, because every page’s history has to transfer.
- HTTPS or hosting move: usually lower risk, but mistakes with redirects and DNS still cause outages.
- Redesign with new structure: content and URLs get reorganized, so mapping matters most here.
Google’s own documentation on site moves with URL changes is worth reading before you start. It’s plain-spoken and it reflects how Google actually treats redirects.
Step 1: Crawl and Record Everything Before You Touch Anything
Before any change, take a full snapshot of the current site. Use a crawler such as Screaming Frog (the free version handles up to 500 URLs) to export every URL, its title tag, meta description, H1, status code, and canonical. Then pull your top pages from Google Search Console (Performance report, last 16 months) and from Google Analytics so you know which pages earn clicks and conversions.
Save these exports somewhere safe. After launch, they’re your baseline. Without them, “did traffic drop because of the migration or because of seasonality?” becomes a guessing game.
Step 2: Build a Redirect Map
This is the step that failed in the story above. Create a spreadsheet with two columns: old URL and new URL. Every old URL that has any value (rankings, backlinks, traffic, or simply exists) should point to its closest equivalent on the new site.
A few rules we stick to:
- Use 301 (permanent) redirects, not 302s, for permanent moves.
- Redirect to the most relevant page, not the homepage. Dumping everything on the homepage is treated by Google much like a soft 404.
- Avoid redirect chains. A to B to C wastes crawl budget and slows users down; point A straight to C.
- Check pages with backlinks first. Export linking pages from a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Search Console’s Links report and make sure those URLs are covered.
If a page genuinely has no equivalent, it’s fine to let it return a 404 or 410. Not everything needs a redirect. But that should be a decision, not an accident.
Step 3: Build and Test on a Staging Site
Set up the new site on a staging environment that’s blocked from search engines, using a password or a noindex rule. Then test it the way a crawler would. Run your crawler against staging and compare it to your baseline: are titles, headings, and internal links carried over? Are images and structured data intact? Does mobile rendering match?
The most common launch-day disaster we see is a leftover “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” setting in WordPress, or a Disallow: / line in robots.txt that was copied from staging to production. Check both twice.
Step 4: Pick a Sensible Launch Window
Avoid launching right before your busiest season or on a Friday afternoon. Choose a time when someone can watch the site for the next 48 hours. Lower the DNS TTL to something like 300 seconds a day or two ahead so the switch propagates quickly, and keep the old hosting live for at least a few weeks in case something needs checking.
Step 5: Launch Day Checklist
- Push the redirects live and spot-check at least 20 of the most important old URLs by hand.
- Confirm robots.txt allows crawling and no stray noindex tags are present.
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
- For a domain change, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console (it requires both properties to be verified).
- Update your Google Business Profile, social profiles, email signatures, and any ad destination URLs.
- Re-crawl the live site and look for 404s, redirect chains, and missing canonicals.
Step 6: Monitor for 4 to 8 Weeks
Small dips right after a migration are normal. Google needs time to recrawl and reprocess your pages, and temporary fluctuation doesn’t always signal a problem. What you’re watching for is a sharp or sustained drop. Check the Search Console Pages report weekly for new “Not found (404)” or “Excluded” errors, compare impressions and clicks against your baseline, and fix redirect gaps as they appear.
One honest caveat: no agency can promise your rankings will stay exactly where they were. Even well-run migrations sometimes see a temporary dip, and the new design, content changes, or speed differences can move things in either direction. What a careful process does is remove the avoidable errors so any change reflects the site itself rather than a mistake.
Quick Answers
How long does it take for Google to process a site move?
Google says it can take several weeks for a move to be fully reflected, and larger sites can take longer. Keep your redirects in place for at least a year.
Do I need to keep the old domain after switching?
Yes. Keep it registered and redirecting indefinitely, or at the very least for as long as other sites still link to it. Letting it lapse sends those links to a dead end, and someone else could register it.
Should I change content and URLs at the same time as the platform?
Where you can, no. Changing too many variables at once makes it hard to tell what caused a problem. If the budget allows, move first, then improve.
The Short Version
Migrations go wrong in predictable ways: missing redirects, blocked crawlers, and no baseline to compare against. All three are preventable with a few days of preparation. If you’re planning a move and want a second set of eyes on your redirect map before launch, that’s something we do regularly for clients.
Written by the team at Technowave Global Solutions, a web design, development, and SEO agency based in Ludhiana, India, working with clients since 2010. Last updated November 2026.