How to migrate or redesign a website without losing your search traffic

A new website is supposed to bring more enquiries. Too often, it brings a traffic drop instead, because pages that ranked for years now return “page not found”. Google’s documentation on site moves is clear about how to avoid this. Here’s that process, adapted for a small business.

Read this if you’re: changing domain, moving platform (for example WordPress to Shopify), restructuring URLs, or redesigning with new page names.

The golden rules

1. Every old URL that matters goes somewhere sensible, with a permanent (301 or 308) redirect. Google says permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank.
2. Change one thing at a time if you can. Google recommends, for example, moving domain first and changing the layout later, not both at once.
3. Keep the content that ranks. A redesign that cuts a detailed service page down to three lines can lose its rankings even with a perfect redirect.
4. Keep redirects for at least a year, and ideally indefinitely.

Step 1: inventory your current URLs

Collect URLs from:

• Your current sitemap
• Search Console: Performance report (pages with clicks and impressions) and Links report (pages with external links)
• Analytics: landing pages with traffic over the last 12 months
• Your CMS or store export (all pages, products, collections, blog posts)
• Images and PDFs that get traffic or links

Record clicks, sessions and links for each. This tells you which URLs matter most.

Step 2: map old to new

For each old URL, choose the closest equivalent on the new site:

Avoid redirecting everything to the homepage. Google treats that much like a missing page, and visitors land somewhere useless.

Step 3: build and test before launch

• Set up the new site with self-referencing canonical tags and updated internal links (pointing to new URLs, not through redirects).
• Prepare redirects at server, platform or CDN level: one hop each, no chains. Google can follow up to 10 hops but recommends going directly to the final destination.
• Prepare the new sitemap.
• Make sure the staging site is blocked from indexing, and note every block you’ll need to remove on launch day.
• Verify both old and new sites in Search Console, if the domain is changing.
• Move tracking: analytics, ad conversions, Meta Pixel, tag manager.

Test the redirect map on staging if your platform allows it, or prepare a script or crawler to test every mapped URL on launch day.

Step 4: launch

1. Turn on redirects.
2. Remove noindex and robots.txt blocks from the new site.
3. Test redirects for every URL in your map (a crawler or script makes this quick). Fix any 404s or chains immediately.
4. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
5. Domain change only: submit a Change of Address in Search Console for the old site. Google notes this isn’t needed for HTTP to HTTPS, www to non-www, or path changes within the same domain.
6. Update internal links, Google Business Profile, social profiles, email signatures and ad campaigns to the new URLs.
7. Ask sites that link to you most to update their links.

Step 5: monitor for three months

Google says a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more for new URLs to replace old ones, and expects temporary ranking fluctuation. A drop that lasts beyond that usually points to a missed redirect, a block, or content that was removed.

Common mistakes

• Redirects that point to URLs that don’t exist on the new site
• Leftover noindex or robots.txt blocks from staging
• Dropping the blog or resources section “because nobody reads it” when it brought most search traffic
• Changing domain, platform, design and content all at once
• Letting the old domain expire. Keep it, with its redirects.

Frequently asked questions

Will we lose rankings even if we do everything right?

Some short-term fluctuation is normal. With complete redirects and the same or better content, most sites recover.

Our new platform forces a different URL structure. Is that a problem?

No, as long as every old URL redirects to its new equivalent. Shopify, for example, uses fixed paths like /products/ and /collections/, and has a built-in URL redirect tool.

How long do we keep the old domain?

As long as it has links and traffic pointing to it, which in practice means years. Renewing it is cheap compared with the traffic it protects.

If you’re planning a migration or redesign and want the SEO side handled, that’s part of our website service.