How to Migrate a Site Without Losing Your Rankings

A platform change, a full redesign, a domain change, or a URL restructure all count as a migration in the eyes of a search engine, even if only one of them feels like the big, scary kind of project internally. Anything that changes a URL, or changes what lives at that URL, resets some of what Google previously knew about that page.

• Export a full list of every URL that currently gets traffic or has backlinks pointing to it, not just the pages that made it into the new sitemap.
• Map every old URL to its new equivalent, one to one, before launch, not after someone notices traffic dropped.
• Set up 301 redirects for the full list, not just the handful someone remembered off the top of their head.
• Keep the old sitemap live and submitted for a few weeks after launch, so Google has an easy path to discover the redirects.

None of this is complicated. It's just tedious, and tedious work is exactly what gets cut when a launch date is fixed and the list of old URLs is long.

Pages that used to rank start returning soft 404s or generic error pages instead of a redirect. Backlink equity pointed at the old URLs goes nowhere instead of passing through to the new ones. Even with a clean migration, it's normal to see a temporary dip while Google re-evaluates the new URLs against what it previously knew.

A short dip after a clean migration is normal. A dip that doesn't recover after a few weeks usually means something on the checklist above didn't actually happen.

Avoid launching right before a weekend, when nobody is around to catch a broken redirect quickly. Watch the Coverage report in Search Console closely for the first month, and be ready to fix issues as soon as they show up rather than waiting for a quarterly check-in.