Search Engine Optimisation
Site Migration SEO
The cheapest time to involve someone is six weeks before launch. The most expensive is the week after.
Site migration SEO protects rankings and traffic through a replatform, redesign, domain change or URL restructure. The Nexclick maps every existing URL to its successor, tests the redirects on staging before launch, and monitors index coverage daily afterwards. Most migration traffic losses are avoidable and happen in the redirect map.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- You are moving from WooCommerce to Shopify, or WordPress to something else, and the URLs are changing.
- You changed domain or rebranded and traffic has not recovered.
- A previous migration cost you rankings and you are about to do another one.
- You are consolidating several sites into one and nobody has planned what happens to the old URLs.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Pre-migration crawl and inventory
- Every live URL captured before anything changes, ranked by organic sessions, revenue and inbound links, so the pages that matter are protected first.
- One-to-one redirect mapping
- Each URL mapped to its closest successor. Blanket redirects to the homepage are treated as soft 404s and throw away the equity you are trying to preserve.
- Redirect testing on staging
- The full map run against the staging environment before launch, checking status codes, chains and loops. Finding a broken rule here costs minutes; finding it live costs weeks.
- Content and metadata parity check
- Confirming that the new pages actually retain the content that earned the rankings. Content quietly lost in a CMS migration is a common and preventable cause of decline.
- Technical continuity
- Canonicals, hreflang, structured data, robots directives and sitemaps carried across correctly — and staging noindex removed at launch, which is the classic catastrophic oversight.
- Launch-day checklist and monitoring
- A run sheet for launch, then daily crawls, index coverage and rank monitoring for the first fortnight so anything broken is caught in hours.
- Post-launch recovery work
- A four-week window of fixes as issues surface. Migrations always surface something; the difference is whether anyone is watching.
Checklist
The pre-launch migration checklist
Run this before any site goes live. Every item on it has, at some point, been the single reason a migration lost traffic. Print it and work through it — you do not need us to use it.
- 01Full crawl of the live site saved and archived before any changes.
- 02Every URL with organic traffic in the last 12 months identified and mapped.
- 03Every URL with inbound links identified and mapped, including ones with no traffic.
- 04Redirect map is one-to-one; no blanket redirects to the homepage.
- 05Redirect chains collapsed to a single hop.
- 06Redirects tested on staging and status codes verified as 301, not 302.
- 07Staging noindex and robots.txt disallow REMOVED before go-live.
- 08Canonical tags point to the new URLs, not the old ones.
- 09hreflang updated if the site is multilingual.
- 10Structured data carried across and re-validated on the new templates.
- 11XML sitemap regenerated with new URLs only, and resubmitted.
- 12Old sitemap left accessible temporarily so Google recrawls the redirects faster.
- 13Analytics and Tag Manager verified as firing on the new site.
- 14Search Console property added for the new domain, and the Change of Address tool used if applicable.
- 15Page content confirmed as retained — not silently truncated by the CMS import.
- 16Internal links updated to point at new URLs directly rather than through redirects.
- 17Server response times checked under load before launch, not after.
- 18A rollback plan agreed and written down before go-live.
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 016 weeks before launch
Inventory
Crawl, analytics export, backlink data and Search Console history. This has to happen while the old site is still live, which is why late involvement limits what can be done.
- 024 weeks before
Map and specify
The redirect map built and handed to your developers as a testable specification, with the URL structure decisions argued rather than inherited.
- 032 weeks before
Test on staging
Redirects verified, technical parity checked, and a go/no-go recommendation given. We will advise delaying a launch, and occasionally do.
- 04Launch to week 4
Launch and watch
Daily monitoring for two weeks, then weekly. Recovery is normally visible within four to eight weeks if the map was right.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- The complete redirect map as a spreadsheet, tested and version-controlled.
- A launch-day run sheet anyone on your team can follow.
- Daily monitoring reports for the first fortnight after launch.
- A before-and-after traffic comparison at 30 and 90 days, stated honestly.
- The full pre-migration crawl archived, so the old site’s structure is never lost.
Tools and platforms
- Screaming Frog (crawl comparison mode)
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics 4
- Ahrefs (backlink and URL data)
- Staging environment access
- Rank tracking with daily frequency
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Six weeks before launch is the right starting point. Four is workable. Two is damage limitation. After launch, expect a dip: a well-executed migration typically sees traffic fall 10–20% for two to four weeks while Google reprocesses, then recover. A migration with no dip at all is unusual, and a migration still down at week eight has a problem that needs finding rather than waiting out. We will tell you which of those you are in rather than advising patience indefinitely.
Pricing model
Fixed-price project
Fixed price against URL count and complexity, covering pre-launch through to four weeks post-launch. Emergency recovery on a migration that already went wrong is quoted separately after a diagnostic.
Questions
Site Migration SEO questions
How much traffic will we lose?
With a properly planned migration, expect a 10–20% dip for two to four weeks, then recovery. With no redirect plan, losses of 50% or more are common and recovery can take months or never fully happen. The variable is almost entirely the quality of the redirect map, not the platform you are moving to.
We already migrated and traffic collapsed. Can it be fixed?
Usually a good deal of it, and the sooner the better. The first job is a diagnostic — comparing an archived crawl of the old site against the new one to find what was not redirected. Recovery is realistic but rarely complete; some link equity does decay while the redirects are missing.
Do we need to keep the old URLs working forever?
Keep redirects in place for at least a year, and permanently for any URL with inbound links. Removing them after six months because the traffic looks stable is a common way to lose ground quietly, because external links continue pointing at the old address indefinitely.
Is changing domain riskier than changing platform?
Yes, meaningfully. A platform change with the same domain and similar URLs is comparatively low risk. A domain change moves everything at once and relies on Google reassociating the whole site. Google’s Change of Address tool helps, and it is still the higher-risk operation.
Can we improve the URL structure while we migrate?
You can, and there is an argument for doing it while you are already redirecting. But every structural improvement adds risk to an operation that is already risky. Our usual advice is to fix genuinely bad structures and leave merely imperfect ones alone until the migration has settled.
Who does the actual redirect implementation?
Your developers, usually, against our specification — and we test the result. Where The Nexclick is also building the site, we do both. What does not work is handing over a spreadsheet with no verification step, which is how untested maps reach production.
Should we launch on a Friday?
No. Launch on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, when your team and ours are available for the following 48 hours. Most migration problems surface within hours and are cheap to fix immediately. The same problem discovered on Monday has had three days to be crawled and indexed.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.