Are you planning a website migration and worried about losing your SEO rankings? You’re not alone. Website migrations—whether they involve a new domain, a redesign, or a CMS change—can put your organic traffic at risk.
With 30 years of experience guiding brands through transitions like these, I’ll walk you through the key SEO steps you must follow to protect your visibility, retain and grow your search engine presence in this article.
Define Your Migration Goals and Scope
Before making any changes, clarify why you’re migrating. Are you moving to a more modern platform, combining domains, shifting subdomains to subfolders, or rebranding altogether? This clarity guides every decision and sets the right expectations.
Next, document the scope of what’s changing: domain name, URL structure, platform, content updates, page templates, internal linking. The broader the change, the higher the SEO risk. If you change only visuals, you’ll still need to be careful—but the effort will differ from a full domain migration.
Gather your stakeholders early: developers, SEO specialists, content teams, UX designers, data analysts, hosting/DevOps. Their input and alignment are vital.
Finally, pull current performance benchmarks: organic traffic, keyword rankings, indexed pages, crawl errors, backlinks. These will be your baseline to evaluate success after launch.
Perform a Full Pre-Migration Audit and Inventory
You must know what you have today so you don’t lose anything tomorrow. Inventory every URL that matters (especially those driving traffic or conversions), and audit content, meta tags, internal link structure, page speed, mobile performance, structured data, canonical tags, and backlinks.
At this stage:
- Crawl your current site to map every page.
- Export traffic, ranking, and backlink data for top pages.
- Identify pages with high value (traffic, links, conversions).
- Flag weak pages or thin content that may need consolidation or removal.
With this snapshot, you’ll spot any drop-offs after migration and act quickly.
Build Your URL Map and Redirect Strategy
One of the most important SEO steps in a migration is redirect mapping. If you change URLs, you must redirect the old ones to the correct new ones to preserve their search equity.
Create a spreadsheet listing every existing URL and its new target. When possible, map to a closely equivalent page. Avoid one-to-many redirects and redirect chains—use straightforward one-to-one 301 redirects for best results.
Also update canonical tags so they point to the new URLs, and review internal links so they link directly to current pages rather than old URLs that redirect.
If you’re changing domains, prepare to use the “Change of Address” tool or its equivalent, and ensure all external links, sitemaps, and properties are updated.
Set Up a Testing Environment and Freeze New Content
Don’t launch into your migration without a staging environment. Set up a mirror of your site (or portion) on a dev/staging server where you test redirects, crawlability, performance and tracking tags.
Also, freezing publishing of new content on the live site for the migration window—adding new pages or changing major structures during a migration complicates benchmarking and increases risk.
Test everything: verify analytics tags and tracking code, review robots.txt and meta robots directives, check site speed metrics (for both desktop and mobile), test internal links and view page load behaviour across devices.
Launch the Migration and Execute Key Switches
Once you’re confident in the staging environment and ready to go live, follow a precise plan. The migration itself should ideally happen quickly (within a day or two) to reduce fluctuations in crawling, indexing and user behaviour.
Execution steps:
- Deploy the new site or changes.
- Apply 301 redirects according to your map.
- Update canonical tags and hreflang (where applicable).
- Replace internal links pointing to old URLs.
- Submit the updated sitemap(s) to search consoles.
- Update robots.txt as needed to avoid accidentally blocking important pages.
- Ensure HTTPS (if applicable), domain canonicalisation and protocol redirects are correctly implemented.
Ensure that you monitor launch closely for errors: 404s, redirect loops, missing pages, tracking failures.
Monitor Post-Launch Metrics and Crawl Immediately
You’re not done after launch—monitoring and remediation are critical. Within the first week, and ideally across the first month, track your key performance indicators: organic traffic, keyword rankings, indexed pages, crawl errors, page speed and user engagement metrics.
Run a full site crawl on the live site to identify broken links, redirect chains, missing meta tags, non-canonicalised URLs, orphan pages or blocked sections. Ensure your analytics tags and tracking are working and capturing data.
Check Search Console (and any equivalent) for crawl errors, indexing issues, mobile usability problems, and security alerts. Fix any flagged issues quickly before they grow.
Update External-Link Profiles and Inform Stakeholders
While your redirects will preserve much of your link equity, it’s still beneficial to reach out to key referrers and ask them to update their links to the new URLs. Especially high-value domains or those with abundant links to your site.
Notify internal teams, partners and social media channels of the change so they can update bookmarks, email templates and marketing collateral. This helps reduce confusion and ensures consistent link signals move to your new structure or domain.
Submit Updated Sitemaps and Maintain Robots.txt
Your XML sitemap should reflect the new live site’s URL structure. Remove outdated or redirected URLs from the sitemap, ensure all canonicalised pages are included, and submit it to search engines via their respective tools.
Meanwhile review and update your robots.txt file. Make sure you aren’t unintentionally blocking crawlers from key sections of your site. Once your site structure has changed, a leftover old robots.txt rule can block search engines entirely.
Track Keyword Performance and Review Analytics
Compare your post-migration performance against the benchmarks you recorded earlier. Track how your top pages are ranking, how organic traffic flows, how many pages are indexed, and whether backlink profiles have been preserved.
Expect some short-term fluctuation—typically traffic may dip slightly in the first 4-6 weeks before stabilizing. But if the dip is excessive or continues beyond this window, dig into the issue (redirects missing, crawl errors, blocked pages, etc.).
Continue using analytics data to monitor bounce rate, pages per session, conversion events and user behavior—since migration is a chance to also improve user experience and engagement.
Ongoing SEO Audit and Optimization Post-Migration
Even after the big migration is complete, continue auditing your website at least monthly for the first 6-12 months to identify any emerging issues. Review:
- Redirect chains or loops
- Canonicalisation problems
- Duplicate content
- Mobile page speed regressions
- Structured data errors
- Backlink health and lost links
Use this post-migration period to implement improvements: optimize internal linking, improve page speed further, freshen up content, restructure navigation if needed, strengthen calls to action, and monitor how your users interact with the new experience.
Special Considerations: Domain Changes, CMS Swaps & URL Re-architectures
If you’re changing your domain name entirely, the risk is higher: you’ll need a complete “Change of Address” submission, comprehensive 301 redirect mapping, and strict monitoring of backlinks.
If you’re changing your CMS or design but keeping the domain and URLs mostly unchanged, your risk is lower—but you still must ensure that metadata, structured data, tracking, and page templates transfer correctly.
If your URL architecture is changing (for instance moving from /blog/ to /articles/, or consolidating categories), you must be meticulous with URL mapping and redirects to keep search signals intact.
Conclusion
Migrating a website is one of the most challenging SEO tasks you can undertake—but done well, it offers an opportunity not only to preserve your visibility but to improve it. The playbook is straightforward: plan carefully, inventory thoroughly, redirect precisely, test extensively, monitor closely, and optimize continuously.
Keep these principles in mind: maintain the old URL equity via 301 redirects, track benchmarks so you know what’s happening, and ensure the new site is faster, cleaner, and better for users (and search engines) than the old one. If you follow the steps above, you will dramatically reduce risk and position your new site for long-term growth.
