Why migrations lose traffic
A website migration changes URLs, structure, content or platform, sometimes all four. Every one of those is a signal Google has to re-learn. Done carefully, you lose a little and recover within weeks. Done carelessly, you lose a lot and some of it never comes back.
The most common cause is depressingly simple: nobody mapped the old URLs to the new ones.
Before launch
- 1Crawl the existing site and export every URL. This is your master list. Without it you are guessing later.
- 2Export Search Console data for the last twelve months. You need to know which pages earn impressions before you change anything.
- 3Benchmark everything. Traffic, rankings, conversions, Core Web Vitals. You cannot prove recovery without a baseline.
- 4Build the redirect map. Every old URL to its closest new equivalent. Not all to the homepage, which is treated as a soft 404.
- 5Preserve content on high-performing pages. If a page ranks, changing it substantially is a risk that needs a reason.
- 6Check the staging site is noindexed and that the noindex will be removed at launch. Both halves of that sentence matter.
At launch
- 1Remove staging blocks. Check robots.txt and meta robots on the live site immediately.
- 2Test redirects in bulk. Run the old URL list through a crawler and confirm each returns a single 301 to a 200 page. No chains, no loops, no 404s.
- 3Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and keep the old one available briefly so Google can discover the redirects.
- 4Verify tracking fires on the new site. Analytics breaking at migration is common and makes diagnosis impossible.
- 5Check canonical tags point to the new URLs.
After launch
- ✓Watch Search Console coverage daily for the first fortnight. A spike in 404s or excluded pages needs immediate attention.
- ✓Monitor server logs if you can, to see what Google is actually crawling.
- ✓Expect a dip. A short-term drop is normal while Google reprocesses. Recovery typically starts within a few weeks.
- ✓Do not panic-change things in week one. Give it time before making further edits, or you will not know what caused what.
- ✓Reclaim external links pointing to old URLs. Redirects pass most value, but updating important ones at source is better.
One practical tip
Do not migrate during your peak season, and do not migrate on a Friday. Give yourself a quiet period with the whole team available for the days afterwards, because that is when problems surface.
Migrations are part of both our web development and SEO, AEO and GEO work, largely because doing them separately is how the redirect map ends up nobody's job.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to recover rankings after a migration?
A well-executed migration usually sees fluctuation for two to four weeks, then recovery. If traffic has not recovered after six to eight weeks, something is genuinely wrong rather than settling.
Should I redirect old URLs to the homepage?
No. Google treats mass redirects to the homepage as soft 404s and passes little value. Map each URL to its closest equivalent, and only use the homepage where nothing relevant exists.
Can I change URLs and redesign at the same time?
You can, but it makes diagnosis harder because you cannot isolate what caused a change. Where the timeline allows, migrating URLs first and redesigning after is lower risk.
