Why migrations lose traffic
Google does not rank your business. It ranks your URLs. Each one has a history: the links it has earned, the queries it has answered, the years it has spent proving it deserves its position. A migration, any migration, a new domain, a new platform, a redesign that changes the URL structure, asks Google to transfer that history to a set of addresses it has never seen.
Handled properly, the transfer works. Handled as an afterthought, which is how most projects handle it, it fails in a specific and predictable way: launch week is celebrated, the traffic graph starts sliding a fortnight later, and by the time anyone connects the two events, the diagnostic trail has gone cold.
The uncomfortable truth is that most migration damage is self-inflicted and entirely preventable. It does not come from an algorithm being unfair. It comes from redirects that were never mapped, content that silently did not make the trip, and technical settings that reset to defaults nobody checked.
What a website migration service actually covers
The phrase covers several different moves, and we handle all of them: a platform change (WordPress to headless, an old builder to WooCommerce or Shopify), a domain change, an HTTPS or hostname consolidation, a redesign that restructures URLs, and international restructures involving hreflang.
What the moves share is the same discipline: benchmark everything before, map everything across, verify everything after. The plan below is the same skeleton regardless of platform, and the platform-specific traps are where experience earns its fee.
The migration plan, step by step
This is the actual sequence we run. It is deliberately unexciting, because a migration is a discipline problem, not a creativity problem.
- Full crawl and benchmark of the current site. Every URL, its rankings, its traffic and its inbound links, recorded before anything changes. You cannot protect what you have not measured, and after launch it is too late to measure it.
- URL mapping, one to one. Every old URL mapped to its new destination in a spreadsheet you can inspect. Not a blanket rule that dumps everything on the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404, but a considered destination for each page that has anything to lose.
- Content and metadata parity check. Titles, descriptions, headings, structured data and the content itself, compared old against new. The pages that earn your traffic keep the substance that earned it.
- Staging validation before launch. The redirect map, the technical settings and the parity checks are all tested on staging, crawled with the same tools Google uses, and fixed while fixing is still cheap.
- Launch, then watch it like a hawk. Redirects verified live within the hour. Search Console monitored daily for coverage errors, ranking movement tracked against the benchmark, and anything that dips investigated while it is a wobble rather than a trend.
Platform moves we handle
Out of page builders. Moving from a heavy builder to WordPress or a modern stack usually improves speed dramatically, which helps rankings, but builders generate strange URL patterns that need careful mapping.
WordPress restructures and headless moves. Permalink changes are small edits with sitewide consequences. Headless rebuilds, the architecture we build ourselves, change how every page renders, so parity checking matters double.
E-commerce replatforms. Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento each impose their own URL conventions, so a store migration is never a copy-paste. Category and faceted URLs are where the equity hides, and where it gets lost.
Domain changes and consolidations. Rebrands, mergers of several sites into one, and country-domain consolidations. These carry the most risk and get the most monitoring.
Redirects, done properly
The redirect map is the heart of the entire exercise, so it is worth stating what "properly" means. One-to-one, old URL to the most relevant new URL, as a 301. Not chains, which leak signal and slow crawling. Not a blanket rule that points everything at the homepage, which Google explicitly treats as a soft 404, meaning the equity you tried to redirect simply evaporates.
And not only for the pages in the navigation. The URLs that matter most are frequently ones nobody remembers: an old blog post that quietly earns links, a landing page from a campaign two years ago, a PDF that other sites cite. The crawl and the backlink data find them; the map preserves them.
After launch: the part everyone skips
A migration is not finished at launch. It is finished when Search Console shows the new URLs indexed, the old URLs redirecting cleanly, and the ranking benchmark recovered. That takes weeks, and it needs watching: coverage errors, redirect failures and template-level mistakes all surface in the first month, and each is cheap to fix if caught early and expensive if found in a quarterly review.
We monitor daily against the pre-migration benchmark and report against it, so "did the migration work?" gets answered with data rather than optimism.