Migrate your website without losing rankings: what to do before touching anything

There's a sentence we hear a lot: "ever since we rebuilt the site, everything has dropped". It's almost never the design. It's that the page addresses changed during the move and nobody left a forwarding note. Migrating a website without losing rankings is entirely doable, but it's decided before anything is touched, not afterwards.

"Migrating" doesn't always mean the same thing

Four very different operations hide behind the same word, and they don't carry the same risk:

• Changing hosting while keeping the domain and the URLs. The simplest one: if everything is copied properly, as far as Google is concerned nothing happened.
• Rebuilding the site on the same domain but changing the page addresses. This is where rankings get lost without redirects.
• Changing domain. The most delicate case, and the slowest to settle.
• Moving from http to https, or switching between with and without "www". Sounds minor and still needs redirects.

And one thing worth settling before you start: if what you want is a site that performs better, the underlying work is SEO, not the redesign. What Google penalises isn't the change: it's finding errors where content used to be. Its documentation covers this in the guide to site moves with URL changes, and it's worth reading before commissioning a redesign.

What actually breaks

These are the five things we find broken when someone calls us after a bad migration:

1. Old addresses return errors

The article that brought visits every month now lives at a different address and the old one returns a 404. Google takes weeks to notice, and meanwhile you lose the positions that page held. The fix is a 301 redirect from each old address to its new equivalent — not everything to the homepage, which is the classic mistake.

2. The new site goes live blocked

Nearly every site is built on a staging domain that's closed to search engines so a half-finished version doesn't get indexed. If that block travels to production, your site disappears from Google within weeks with no warning at all.

3. The copy gets left behind

Redesigns tend to shorten the text because it looks cleaner. The trouble is that the page that ranked did so because of what it said. Going from a thousand words to two hundred removes exactly what people were finding you for.

4. Email goes down with the website

Moving the domain without taking the mailboxes leaves the company without email for a whole day, sometimes with messages lost. It's the part that causes the most grief and appears least often in quotes.

5. Nobody checks the internal links

Links in the menu, the footer and inside the copy still point to the old addresses. The site works, but inside it's full of dead ends.

The checklist for before you touch anything

Half an hour of preparation saves months of recovery:

• Export the full list of current URLs. From Search Console, the sitemap, or by crawling the site. Without that list there are no redirects to build.
• Note which pages bring traffic and for which searches. Those are the untouchable ones.
• Take a complete backup of the site and the database, and verify it. A backup you haven't restored isn't a backup; Spain's INCIBE publishes free material on doing them properly.
• Prepare the redirect map old → new, one by one, before going live.
• Confirm who holds the domain and the access. If the domain is in the previous agency's name, have that conversation first.
• Warn whoever runs the email and keep the mailbox passwords to hand.

And the checklist for switch-over day

• Remove the indexing block and check robots.txt at yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
• Test twenty old URLs by hand. If they redirect to their equivalent page, you're on track.
• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing for the pages that sell most.
• Send a test email from an external account and check it arrives and can be replied to.
• Fill in your own contact form and see whether the notification reaches you.
• Check the certificate and that everything loads over https without warnings.

Google keeps a dedicated page on redirects and how to use them. It's the dullest part of the process and the one that decides the outcome.

How long recovery takes

Even done properly, a migration with address changes shakes the ground for a few weeks. What's normal:

• Hosting change only, same URLs: you shouldn't notice anything.
• Redesign with new URLs and correct redirects: two or three weeks of movement, then back to the previous position — sometimes better, if the new site is faster.
• Domain change: one to three months to settle, and keep the redirects for at least a year.

If nothing has recovered after six weeks, patience isn't the issue: something is set up wrong. And if you want the fuller picture, we wrote separately about the real SEO timelines.

I already migrated and lost rankings: now what

If the move is done and traffic has dropped, waiting won't help. This is the order for working out what happened, and it takes an afternoon:

• Check whether you're indexed. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If two pages come up where there used to be forty, the problem is blocking or indexing, not rankings.
• Read the pages report in Search Console. It spells it out: "excluded by noindex tag", "blocked by robots.txt", "not found (404)".
• Take your ten best-performing pages and test their old addresses one by one. Every 404 is a position on its way down.
• Compare the copy. Open the cached version of the old page next to the new one. If half the content is missing, there's your explanation.

Those four checks identify 90% of cases. What redirects can recover comes back within weeks; what was lost by removing content has to be written again.

Changing provider without it costing you

There's a reason plenty of people stay with an agency they're not happy with: fear of the move. Losing the email, the site being down for a day, paying twice.

In our plans, migrating the website and the email accounts is included, and it's published that way on our pricing page: from €400 a month for Basic Presence, with high-performance hosting, ten mailboxes, three articles on the site, three on the Google profile and every review answered. The €750 and €1,500 plans add more content and campaigns. VAT excluded, no lock-in.

If you only want the website, Your Landing is €100 a month and Your Website €200 a month, with hosting, email and maintenance included. Migration is in there too: switching has no entry cost.

And something we always say: if your current site works well, we leave it where it is or bring it across, whichever suits. There's no reason to rebuild something that already performs.

Before commissioning that redesign, ask this

• Do the page addresses stay the same? If they change, is there a redirect map?
• Who checks the old URLs after launch, and against which list?
• Is the copy that currently ranks being kept?
• Is the email migrated the same day, and who's watching if something fails?
• Whose name do the domain and hosting end up in?

Five questions answered in a minute that separate a quiet move from three months of surprises. If any of them doesn't get a clear answer, message us on WhatsApp and we'll tell you what we'd do in your case.