guide · WEBSITE MIGRATION SEO
Relaunch WithoutLosing Traffic.
Most search losses at relaunch come from a handful of preventable mistakes, all of which are checkable before you go live and dated afterwards so you can see what happened.
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01 · the short answer
How to not lose traffic.
Write down every address on the old site, decide where each one goes on the new site, and point them there permanently before launch. That single step prevents most of the damage a relaunch does.
Then keep the words. A redesign that quietly cuts the page copy in half loses the search along with it, because what was ranking was the content, not the design.
Expect a small dip in the first few weeks even when it goes well. What separates a dip from a real loss is whether anybody wrote down what changed, and on what day.
02 · how it works
What a migration breaks.
Search treats every address on your site as a separate thing with its own history. Change the address, delete the page, or strip its content, and that history has nowhere to land.
There are five kinds of migration and they carry different risk. Changing domain name is the highest. Changing platform while keeping the addresses is the lowest. A redesign that also reorganizes the address structure catches people out, because it looks like a design project and behaves like a domain move.
The redirect map
One row per old address, one destination each, permanent. This document is the migration.
The content check
Compare the old page against the new one for the pages that actually earn traffic. If the new page says less, the search goes with the words that left.
The crawl check
Staging sites are usually blocked from search on purpose. Shipping that block to production is the most common single cause of a relaunch disappearing.
The measurement baseline
Export traffic, positions and the top pages before anything moves. Without a before, nobody can say whether the after is a problem.
03 · what changes it
What decides how far you drop.
Two sites can run the same relaunch and get different outcomes.
| what you are changing | Risk | What makes it safe |
|---|---|---|
| Platform only, addresses unchanged | Low | Confirm every address still resolves, and watch speed |
| Redesign, addresses unchanged | Low to medium | Keep the copy on the pages that earn traffic |
| Redesign plus new address structure | High | A complete redirect map, checked line by line |
| New domain name | Highest | Redirect map, plus tell Search Console the site moved |
| Merging two sites into one | Highest | Decide which page wins for each topic before you build |
04 · how to speed it up
How to recover faster.
After launch there is a short window where fixing something takes days and leaving it takes months, and most of the work in that window is checking instead of building.
The order below is what I do in the first two weeks after any relaunch. Every item lands as a dated row you can open.
Where AI helps
AI crawls every address on both versions and catches the regressions a person would only find by accident. It is the engine that makes a line by line check practical for one marketer. What to fix first is still my call.
05 · common questions
Website migration questions.