SEO Migrations

A migration is one of those moments where SEO is either protected or lost. When you switch platform, domain or redesign, you change the foundation beneath everything Google has learned about your site. A single overlooked redirect, a changed URL structure or a forgotten canonical can cost months of work — and it's often discovered only when the traffic is already gone.

That's why I treat migrations as a project of their own, with thorough preparation, a complete redirect plan and close post-launch monitoring. The goal is simple: that you come out the other side with your rankings and revenue intact — ideally without anyone noticing a switch happened at all.

The pre-analysis is the most important step, and it's often rushed. Before anything changes, I map every URL, every ranking, every backlink and all traffic. That data is what later determines whether the migration succeeded — because without knowing where you stood before, you can't measure what you lost. I also document the business-critical pages (the ones driving the most revenue), so we can prioritise protecting them first.

Redirect mapping is the heart of any migration. Every old URL needs a 1:1 relationship to a new relevant URL — not just a blanket redirect to the homepage. I build the mapping in spreadsheets, test it thoroughly before launch, and make sure there are no redirect chains (hops across multiple URLs), 404s or redirects to irrelevant pages. Redirects have to be 301 (permanent) to pass authority, and they need to stay in place for at least 12 months post-migration.

The staging test is the step I see skipped most often — and it's also where most migrations fail. I test the entire new site in a staging environment before it goes live: crawl it with Screaming Frog, verify hreflang, canonical, meta tags and structured data across all templates, and simulate the redirect flow from a representative sample of old URLs. If something can go wrong, we find it HERE, not after launch.

The launch window needs to be planned strategically. Never migrate in high season or during a campaign — pick a low-traffic period where a few days of uncertainty cost the least. I coordinate closely with developers and marketing, make sure Search Console and Analytics are set up on the new site, and have a clear rollback plan in case something critical goes wrong in the first 24-48 hours.

Post-launch monitoring is where the migration is either saved or lost for good. For the first two weeks, I track indexing, crawl errors, rankings and traffic daily. Everything from temporary ranking swings to unexpected 404 patterns is handled proactively. After three months, we do a full evaluation where I compare performance against the pre-analysis data — so we know exactly whether the migration succeeded and where any follow-up work is needed.