Technical SEO

Site migration

A migration is any change to a site's domain, URL structure, platform or content organisation. It is the highest-risk event in SEO and the most often under-planned.

The non-negotiable deliverable is a one-to-one redirect map built from a crawl of the old site plus every URL with impressions in Search Console and every URL with external links. Anything left out loses its history. Redirecting non-matching URLs to the homepage is not a fallback; engines treat it as a soft 404 and the signal is lost entirely.

Plan the measurement before the launch: a frozen baseline of impressions, clicks and positions by template, a crawl of the old site kept as an archive, and a monitoring window of at least eight weeks. Expect a dip regardless of quality — the question is depth and duration, and a well-executed migration recovers within four to eight weeks.

In practice

  • Build the redirect map from crawl + Search Console + backlink data, not from the CMS alone
  • Never bulk-redirect to the homepage
  • Freeze a performance baseline by template before launch
  • Keep the old site's crawl as an archive for at least a year

Related terms

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