• Change as few things at once as possible. Domain, platform, design and content together make problems hard to diagnose.
• Crawl and benchmark the old site before anything changes.
• The redirect map is the single most important deliverable.
• Keep staging out of the index, and remove those blocks at launch.
• Expect some fluctuation. A well-run migration usually recovers within weeks, and a poor one can take months.

Migrations are where a lot of organic traffic is lost, usually for avoidable reasons. Involving SEO at the planning stage, not the week before launch, makes the biggest difference of all.

Types of migration

• Domain change: rebrand, merger or move from a ccTLD to a generic domain.
• Protocol or hostname change: http to https, or www changes.
• Platform change: moving CMS or ecommerce system.
• URL restructure: new folder structure or slugs.
• Redesign or template change: new layout, navigation and front-end.
• Content consolidation: merging or pruning pages.

Each has its own risks. Combining several multiplies them.

Phase 1: planning and benchmarking

• Agree scope, timing and what success looks like. Avoid peak trading periods.
• Crawl the existing site completely and save the crawl.
• Gather every known URL: crawl data, sitemaps, analytics landing pages, Search Console pages, backlink targets and log files.
• Record benchmarks: rankings, organic traffic and conversions by template, indexed page counts and Core Web Vitals.
• Identify the pages that carry the most traffic, revenue and links.

Phase 2: redirect mapping

• Map every old URL with value to its closest new equivalent.
• Use 301 redirects, one hop, at page level.
• Update existing redirects so old chains point straight to the new final URLs.
• Where there is no equivalent, choose the nearest parent category or let the URL return a 404 or 410. Do not default to the homepage.
• Include image URLs if images drive traffic.

Phase 3: pre-launch checks on staging

• Staging is protected by password or IP restriction, which is safer than relying on robots.txt.
• Titles, meta descriptions, headings, copy and structured data have carried over.
• Canonicals, hreflang and internal links use new final URLs, not staging URLs.
• The XML sitemap is ready.
• Robots.txt for production is correct.
• Analytics and tag management are firing.
• The redirect map has been tested against staging in list mode.
• Rendering, mobile parity and performance are at least as good as before.

Phase 4: launch

• Remove noindex tags and staging blocks.
• Put redirects live and test a sample immediately.
• Submit new sitemaps. Keep the old sitemap available for a short while so Google recrawls the old URLs and sees the redirects.
• For domain changes, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console.
• Crawl the new site and the old URL list straight away.

Phase 5: monitoring

• Check Search Console daily at first: Page indexing, Crawl stats and any spikes in 404s or server errors.
• Watch log files for bots hitting unmapped URLs.
• Compare rankings and traffic to benchmarks by template.
• Ask owners of your most valuable backlinks to update their links.
• Keep the old domain registered and redirects live for the long term.

Common mistakes

• Launching with staging noindex or Disallow: / still in place.
• No redirect map, or a map covering only top pages.
• Redirecting everything to the homepage.
• Removing content, changing titles and restructuring navigation all at the same time as the move.
• Losing structured data, hreflang or canonical logic in the new templates.
• Moving to a JavaScript framework without server-side rendering.
• Forgetting subdomains, PDFs and other assets.
• Letting the old domain lapse.

How long does recovery take?

A straightforward move with good redirects often stabilises within a few weeks. Larger sites take longer because there is more to recrawl. Domain changes typically see more volatility than same-domain restructures. If traffic has not recovered after a few months, something specific is wrong and worth investigating.

The GEO angle

AI models hold on to old brand names and URLs for a long time, because training data is not refreshed as quickly as a search index. After a rebrand or domain move, expect assistants to keep mentioning the old name and linking to old addresses. Permanent redirects, updated third-party profiles and consistent entity information (Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, schema sameAs links) help them catch up.

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