Web & SEO
What is a website migration?
A website migration is any change that moves a site to a new platform, domain, URL structure, or hosting setup while keeping its content and search performance intact.
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Technical definition
Migrations fall into four types, and a project often involves more than one at once: platform migrations move to a different builder or CMS, domain migrations change the address, structural migrations change URLs or navigation, and hosting migrations move the same site to a different server.
The search-critical work is the redirect map, a one-to-one list pairing every existing URL with its destination on the new site. Supporting steps include rebuilding the sitemap, preserving title tags and meta descriptions, carrying over analytics and tracking, and keeping the old site reachable until the new one is verified.
In plain terms
You are moving house. The furniture is the easy part. What causes problems is everything that pointed at the old address: forwarded mail, delivery instructions, the friends who still have your old postcode.
On a website, those are your links, your rankings, and your bookmarks. A migration is the work of making sure all of them find the new place.
Why it matters
Migrations are where hard-won search traffic disappears, and it usually happens the same way. The new site looks better, launches on schedule, and uses a cleaner URL structure. Nobody mapped the old URLs. Every ranking page now returns an error, and organic traffic falls within days.
The protection is boring and it works. Export a full list of your current URLs before you start. Map each one to its replacement. Set up 301 redirects for every pair. Keep your page titles and descriptions unless you have a reason to change them. Submit the new sitemap and watch your search console for errors for a month afterward. Do that and a migration is uneventful, which is the only outcome worth having.
