01 — Migration
Migration
Most traffic lost in a redesign was lost in the redirects.
A migration is the highest-risk routine event in a website's life, and the risk is almost entirely manageable.
Website migration covers moving a site to a new domain, platform, structure or protocol without losing organic traffic. The decisive work is redirect mapping, done and verified before launch, plus close monitoring in the weeks after. Sites that skip it routinely lose most of their organic traffic overnight.
02 — Detail
Why migrations fail.
The usual cause is treating redirects as a launch-day task. Mapping every old URL to its closest equivalent takes real effort on a large site, and doing it under pressure on the day produces a blanket redirect of everything to the home page, which tells Google every old page is gone.
The second cause is redirecting in chains: old page to intermediate page to final page. Each hop loses a little and slows crawling. Every redirect should point directly at its destination.
The third is nobody watching afterwards. Problems surface over days and weeks as Google recrawls, and the first fortnight after launch is when a mistake is still cheap to fix.
03 — How it works
How we run a migration.
- 01
Inventory
Every existing URL, with its traffic and the links pointing at it.
- 02
Map
Each old URL to its closest new equivalent. Not everything to the home page.
- 03
Stage
Redirects tested on staging before launch, including the awkward edge cases.
- 04
Launch
Sitemap resubmitted, indexing requested, analytics continuity preserved.
- 05
Monitor
Crawl errors and rankings watched closely for the first weeks.
04 — Questions
Next step
Planning a redesign or a domain change?
Talk to us before launch, not after. The redirect map is the difference between a dip and a disaster.
- WhatsApp · +55 24 99929-8231
- Email · [email protected]
- Volta Redonda, Brazil · remote worldwide