How to Migrate a Website Without Losing Rankings

Whether you’re rebuilding your site, changing platform or moving host, a migration carries one big risk: losing the search rankings you’ve worked hard to build. Done carefully, though, your SEO is fully protected — and often improves.

Here’s how to migrate safely.

Preserve your URLs (or redirect them)

The biggest cause of lost rankings in a migration is changed URLs with no redirects — every old page that 404s loses its equity. The fix is to keep URLs the same where possible, and 301-redirect any that change to their new equivalent.

A complete redirect map is the single most important part of a safe migration.

Keep your SEO intact

Carry over your page titles, descriptions, headings and content, and make sure the new site is set to be indexed. Don’t accidentally launch with “noindex” left on from the build — a surprisingly common and costly mistake.

Preserving on-page SEO keeps Google recognising your pages.

Launch carefully and monitor

Test thoroughly before going live, submit your updated sitemap, and watch Search Console closely afterwards for any errors or drops, so anything can be caught and fixed quickly.

We handle migrations carefully so you keep your rankings — and your sanity.

Post-migration checks and recovery

In the weeks after a migration, monitor Google Search Console daily. Look for a surge in crawl errors, a drop in indexed pages, or pages that previously ranked dropping out of search results. A small dip during the transition is normal; a sustained fall after two weeks suggests something needs fixing.

Check that all your important pages are indexed correctly by searching "site:yourdomain.com" in Google. Verify that redirects are returning a 301 status code (not 302 or a redirect chain). Fix any canonicals that point to the old domain. We project-manage migrations end-to-end and monitor the post-launch period to catch problems early.