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Website Migration
A website migration is a major change to a site's domain, structure, platform or design that can significantly affect its search visibility.
What is a website migration?
A website migration is any major change to a website that can affect how search engines find, understand and rank it. Common types are:
- Domain changes, such as a rebrand or merging country domains (ccTLDs) into one international domain.
- Structure changes, such as new URLs, new folders or language versions.
- Platform changes, such as moving to a new CMS.
- Protocol changes, such as moving from HTTP to HTTPS.
Migrations are among the riskiest SEO projects. Without careful planning, a site can lose a large share of its organic traffic for months. Done well, the dip is short and the new structure performs better.
The essentials:
- Redirect map: every old URL gets a 301 redirect to its most relevant new URL – not all to the homepage.
- Benchmark first: record rankings, traffic and top pages before the move.
- Update signals: canonical tags, hreflang tags, internal links and XML sitemaps must point to the new URLs.
- Tell Google: for a domain move, use the Change of Address tool in Google Search Console.
- Monitor closely: check crawl errors, 404 pages and indexing daily in the first weeks.
International migrations need extra care, because errors in hreflang or redirects affect every market at once. Plan, test on a staging environment and launch outside your peak season.