Moving a website is when rankings get lost, and it is rarely because Google punishes the move. It is because the old pages stop answering. Every page Google knows about is a page somebody might click on from a search result tomorrow. If that click lands on a “page not found”, Google notices, and within a few weeks the result is gone.
The fix is not complicated, but it has to happen in the right order. This is the checklist we use whenever a site changes hands, changes platform or gets rebuilt, and it holds whether you are switching web designer, moving host or changing your domain name.
Does changing your website affect SEO?
Yes, but how much depends on what changes. A new design on the same addresses, with the same words, barely registers. New addresses, new wording and a new domain all at once is the riskiest move there is, because Google has to relearn everything about the site at the same moment.
So the first rule of a website migration is to change as little as you need to at the same time. If you are changing the domain and the design, consider doing them a few weeks apart.
1. List every page you have now
Before anything is built, write down every address the current site has. Do it now, because once the old site is switched off, the list is much harder to rebuild. Pull it from four places, since each one sees pages the others miss:
- The old sitemap. Type your address followed by /sitemap.xml and save a copy.
- Search Console. The Pages report lists what Google has indexed, and the Links report shows which pages other sites link to. Those are the ones you cannot afford to break.
- A crawl. The free version of Screaming Frog lists every page it can reach by following links.
- Your analytics. The landing pages report shows where visitors actually arrive, including old pages nothing links to any more.
Merge them into one spreadsheet, one address per row. This list matters more than anything else in a migration, and it is the step most often skipped.
We learned that ourselves. When we rebuilt our own site, we first guessed the old addresses and got them wrong: the real ones sat one folder deeper than we remembered. It was the old site’s sitemap, still in our files, that put it right.
2. Make sure you control the domain first
You cannot redirect anything without access to the domain’s settings. If the domain is registered in your old web company’s name, sort that out before you tell them you are leaving. We cover how in who actually owns your website.
While you are in the domain settings, write down every record you find there, not just the ones for the website. Your email depends on records in the same place. Moving the website to a new host and forgetting to copy the email records across is the most common way a site move takes a business’s inbox down with it.
3. Keep the same addresses wherever you can
The safest redirect is the one you never need. If a page lives at /boiler-repair/ today and the new site still has a boiler repair page, keep the same address. Rankings belong to addresses, so an unchanged address carries its history across without any help.
Where an address has to change, because the platform forces a new structure or two pages are being merged, it goes in the next step.
4. Redirect every old address to its closest match
Go back to the spreadsheet and add a second column: where each old page should now go. Then set up a permanent redirect, known as a 301, from each old address to its new one. Three rules:
- The closest match, not the homepage. Pointing every old page at the homepage looks tidy, but Google treats it as a missing page and passes nothing on. An old page about kitchen fitting goes to the new kitchen fitting page.
- One hop, not a chain. If old page A redirects to B, which redirects to C, point A straight at C. Each extra hop is slower for visitors and followed reluctantly by Google.
- Permanent, not temporary. A 302 tells Google the move is temporary, so it keeps the old address in its results.
Do not forget the pages nobody visits any more but other sites still link to. Those links are some of the most valuable things your site has, and a redirect is the only way to keep their value.
5. Carry across what already ranks
A redesign is the moment people cut copy, and the page that gets trimmed is often the one Google was ranking. Before you rewrite anything, check in Search Console which pages bring in clicks, and which searches they appear for. Keep those pages’ titles, headings and main points unless you have a good reason to change them. Improving them is fine. Losing them is the risk.
6. Keep the new site hidden until launch, then unhide it
While the new site is being built, it should be blocked from search engines so Google does not index a half-finished copy. That block is usually a noindex tag or a Disallow: / line in robots.txt. Going live with it still in place is one of the most common migration mistakes there is, because nothing looks wrong to a visitor. The site simply stops appearing in search.
On launch day, check robots.txt by hand, and view the source of a few pages for the word noindex.
7. Launch day checks
- Test the redirects. Paste the old addresses into Screaming Frog in list mode, or open a dozen by hand. Each should land on the right new page in one hop.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and remove the old one. When we checked our own account, the only sitemap Google had was the one for the previous version of our site, because the new one had never been submitted.
- Check the canonical tags. Each page should name its own new address as the original, not an old one or a staging copy.
- Point your own links at the final address. Links inside the site should go straight to each page, not to an address that redirects. We once found about fifteen hundred internal links on our own site that each went through a redirect, because they were missing a trailing slash. Nothing looked broken, but Google was fetching two addresses for every page.
- Check email still works. Send one in and one out.
8. If the domain is changing too
- Verify the new domain in Search Console, then use the Change of address tool on the old one. It tells Google the move is deliberate.
- Keep the old domain registered and redirecting for at least a year, which is Google’s own guidance. Longer is better: old links and printed materials will keep sending people to it for years.
- Update the address everywhere you control it: your Google Business Profile, social profiles, directory listings and email signatures.
9. Watch Search Console for four to six weeks
Some movement after a migration is normal. Impressions often wobble for a few weeks while Google recrawls the site. What you are watching for is a cliff rather than a wobble:
- Pages report: a rising count of “Not found (404)” means some old addresses were missed. Add redirects for them.
- Performance report: compare clicks by page against the same weeks before the move. A page that has dropped to nothing has usually lost its redirect or its content.
- Sitemaps: the new sitemap should show as read successfully, with the number of pages you expect.
Most problems show up in the first fortnight, and nearly all of them are fixed by a missing redirect.
Not sure what is broken?
If you have already moved and traffic has dropped, our free website audit checks the things that usually go wrong: broken links, redirect chains, a robots.txt blocking search engines, missing titles and missing sitemaps. It takes about a minute.
If you are moving to Onlineify, migration from an existing site is a published add-on. The words, images and posts worth keeping come across, and every address Google already knows is pointed at its new home.