A year ago a manufacturing company came to us after launching a beautiful new website built by another agency. Within six weeks, their organic traffic had dropped by more than 60 percent and enquiries had almost dried up. The new site wasn't bad. The migration was.
Every old URL had changed, and none of them redirected to the new pages. Years of accumulated links and rankings pointed at "page not found" errors.
It took months to recover most of it. Here's how to avoid that situation entirely.
Before you start: take inventory
List every URL on the old site. Use a crawler like Screaming Frog, plus your sitemap, plus Google Search Console's pages report, plus Google Analytics landing pages. Don't forget PDFs and images that get traffic.
Find your most valuable pages. Which pages get the most organic traffic? Which have the most external links? Which bring in enquiries? These need the most care.
Record current performance. Save rankings for key search terms, traffic per page, and Search Console data. You'll need a baseline to compare against.
Plan the redirects
Create a spreadsheet mapping every old URL to its closest equivalent on the new site. Then implement 301 (permanent) redirects for all of them.
Rules we follow:
- Redirect to the most relevant page, not just the homepage. Mass redirects to the homepage are treated like errors by Google.
- Avoid redirect chains (A to B to C). Point directly to the final URL.
- If a page genuinely has no equivalent, it's okay to let it return a 404 or 410, but consider whether the content should be kept.
- Keep URLs the same wherever possible. The best redirect is the one you don't need.
Keep the content that ranks
Redesigns often "simplify" content by cutting text from pages. If a services page ranks well because it explains the service in detail, a new version with three lines and a big image will likely lose rankings. Keep or improve the content on your key pages.
Technical checks before launch
- Page titles and meta descriptions carried over or improved
- Headings structure preserved on important pages
- Internal links updated to new URLs
- Structured data in place
- XML sitemap generated with the new URLs
robots.txtnot blocking the site. (We've seen staging settings that block search engines go live by mistake more than once. It's a classic.)- Canonical tags pointing to the right URLs
- Page speed as good as or better than the old site
Launch day and after
- Go live during a quieter period, not before a big sale.
- Test a large sample of old URLs and confirm they redirect correctly.
- Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console.
- If the domain changed, use Search Console's Change of Address tool.
- Monitor crawl errors, traffic and rankings daily for the first two weeks, then weekly for three months.
Some fluctuation in the first few weeks is normal while Google processes the changes. A steep, sustained drop usually means something was missed, and the sooner you find it, the faster you recover.
Keep the redirects
Don't remove redirects after a few months. Old links on other websites, bookmarks and printed materials will keep sending people to old URLs for years. Redirects are cheap to keep.
A well-planned migration often improves rankings, because the new site is faster and better structured. The planning just has to happen before launch, not after the traffic drops.
