Don’t Crash Your Traffic: A Beginner’s Guide to Website Migration

• • A website migration involves major changes to your site’s structure, platform, or domain. If done wrong, it can seriously hurt your traffic and rankings.
  • SEO plays a critical role in migration. Losing redirects, metadata, or tracking can result in lost visibility and long-term performance issues.
  • You should benchmark your site’s current performance before the move to track what changes post-launch and catch problems early.
  • After migration, use tools like Screaming Frog and Google Search Console to check for crawl errors, broken links, and indexing issues.
  • Migration doesn’t end at launch. Ongoing monitoring and fast fixes are essential to protect your investment and keep your site growing.
  • Download our SEO website migration checklist at the end of this article.

When birds migrate, it’s not a random flight. It’s a carefully timed, high-risk journey driven by instinct and survival. One wrong move, bad weather, poor timing, or lost direction can change everything.

A website migration isn’t much different. It’s a chance to reach a better place that’s faster, stronger, and more user-friendly. But it demands careful planning, precision, and a little trust in the process. Done right, migration strengthens your brand for the long haul and helps you soar. Done wrong, it leaves you grounded, watching your traffic disappear.

Here’s our guide to migrating your website safely, without losing everything you’ve worked so hard to build. We mapped it out into 3 phases of migration: Plan > Move > Monitor. Now let’s fly!

Phase 1: Plan. Your rankings depend on it.

Before you lift off, know exactly what you’re moving and why.

Rushing this stage is one of the fastest ways to lose organic traction. A successful website migration starts long before a single file is moved; it begins with a clear roadmap of what’s staying, what’s changing, and why it matters.

Here’s what to prioritize in your planning phase:

1. Benchmark your current site

Run a full crawl of your current site. Catalog all existing URLs, internal links, backlinks, and metadata. Look at what’s performing well, not just in terms of traffic, but also in terms of conversions, engagement, or brand visibility.

This gives you a baseline for comparison and ensures nothing important slips through the cracks. It also helps to know what’s broken, so you can avoid carrying old problems into a new build.

2. Set clear migration goals

Every migration should have a purpose. Are you trying to improve user experience? Changing platforms for flexibility and ease of use? Cleaning up a bloated site? Get aligned on the “why,” so your team can make the right calls when you have to make trade-offs.

3. Build a detailed migration checklist

This isn’t just a dev job. The SEO, design, content, and analytics teams all need to fly in formation. Your checklist should include:

• • URL changes and 301 redirect plans
  • Pages flagged for no-index or removal
  • Preservation of metadata (titles, descriptions, OG tags)
  • Canonical tags and structured data
  • Sitemap and robots.txt updates
  • Analytics and tag migration (GA4, GTM, etc.)

Break each step down by owner and deadline. Migration is a team project; failing to include all parts of the team can lead to avoidable issues.

4. Use a staging environment

Run a thorough review of the staging site — not just the design, but also site taxonomy, redirects, code structure, and crawlability. If your SEO team isn’t testing the staging build, you’re winging it blind.

5. Back everything up

A complete backup of your site files, database, and images is non-negotiable. If something breaks, you’ll want the ability to roll back instantly.

Pro Tip: Even a minor design tweak or platform change can have unexpected consequences for SEO. Always benchmark rankings, traffic, and crawl health before the move so you can compare apples to apples afterward.

Phase 2: Move. Execute a controlled launch

With a clear plan in place, it’s time to execute carefully.

This is where most website migrations go wrong. The site goes live. Everyone’s relieved.

But beneath the surface? Redirects are missing, metadata is blank, crawl errors start stacking up, and traffic begins to dip.

Migrations don’t fail because people forget to move the site. They fail because they move it without protecting the SEO groundwork that allows search engines to crawl it, users to navigate it, and your rankings to stay aloft.

Here’s what to double-check before you hit publish:

• • Use a staging site first – Any dev or SEO specialist worth their salt stresses testing in a staging environment to catch crawlability, SEO, and UX issues before launch. Webflow explicitly advises, “never go live without a test site.“

Pro Tip: A staging environment lets you catch mistakes before they cause real damage.

• • Set up 301 redirects correctly – Google’s John Mueller said: “It doesn’t matter if you’re completely rebuilding a website or if you’re just removing a slash from the end of URLs. These are all essentially site moves.”

Mapping 301 redirects from every old URL to its new version is non-negotiable. It’s the single most important technical step for preserving your rankings during migration. So map every old URL to its new home. No shortcuts. A missed redirect means lost authority, broken backlinks, and frustrated users.

Pro Tip: Always make sure the redirects tested on the staging site are updated to reflect the new website’s URL structure. The last thing you want are redirects from your live website to a test environment.

• • Preserve SEO essentials – Carry over title tags, meta descriptions, header structures, alt text, and schema markup. If you lose your SEO signals, you lose your search equity.
  • Fix bad links now – Not all links can, or should, be fixed with a redirect. Audit and clean up broken links during migration, not after. Broken links are a migration killer. Crawlers hit dead ends. Users get frustrated. Authority evaporates.
  • Launch during a low-traffic window – Migrate during slower periods, when user activity is lower. This will give your team breathing room to monitor performance, address issues, and make course corrections without disrupting users. It would be awful for your business to have technical problems during your best sales period of the year.

Pro Tip: There’s a standard dev saying, “Never ship on a Friday.” If something breaks, you’re either dragging the team into weekend damage control or letting your site limp along while hoping Google doesn’t notice. Schedule your migration when everyone’s online, alert, and ready to handle the fallout.

A migration doesn’t end when you land. Before you settle into your new nest, you need to check things: the structure, the stability, the signals you’re sending out. Even a smooth landing can hide cracks like broken redirects, indexing issues, traffic drops you didn’t see coming. If you’re not watching closely, small problems can spiral into major losses.

Phase 3 is where you make sure your new home is an improvement – and fix what isn’t working – before it costs you.

Phase 3: Monitor the launch. Protect your results.

Landing the website migration is just the beginning. Now it’s about making sure everything works, and fixing what doesn’t before small issues turn into bigger ones.

Here’s what you need to monitor post-launch:

• • Crawl the new site immediately

Use Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to audit your site and scan for broken links, missing tags, redirect errors, and other technical issues.

• • Check tracking and analytics tags

Confirm that GA4, Google Tag Manager, and any event or goal tracking are firing correctly. Gaps in your metrics post-launch usually point to broken tracking and make it harder to compare performance one-to-one.

• • Track Google Search Console daily

Search Console is your direct connection to how Google sees your website in search results. Keep an eye out for crawl errors, indexing issues, or changes to your sitemap status. Set up alerts to catch problems early.

Pro Tip: If you see any manual action or flagging, take action right away and consider reverting the site while you figure out how to address the issues being called out.

• • Monitor rankings and traffic

Fluctuations in ranking are normal. However, any sharp, ongoing drops in visibility or traffic often signal deeper technical problems that need immediate attention.

Pro Tip: Major content edits to a page or page removals can also contribute to large swings, but they are often associated with improvements in other topical clusters.

• • Fix issues fast

Prioritize broken pages and redirects, slow-loading pages, missing content, and any crawl errors flagged by Search Console or your crawler tools.

Semrush’s free audit tool categorizes issues by severity, making it easy to prioritize and tackle the biggest risks first.

Quick Fact: According to Conductor, 94% of botched migrations are due to missed technical issues, not content or design flaws.

See a website migration in action

At Redefine, migrations aren’t just theory for us. We’ve led them through real-world, high-stakes scenarios.

Discover how we preserved search equity during a major brand merger — protecting rankings, visibility, and long-term growth during one of the most vulnerable stages of a company’s evolution.

Need the site migration checklist?

Get a free copy you can reference before, during, and after your move, made by the SEO and migration experts at Redefine.