In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, a website is more than just an online presence; it’s the backbone of your brand identity, sales performance, and user experience. Whether your business is rebranding, adopting new technology, or striving to enhance online visibility, there often comes a point where a website migration becomes essential. Partnering with an experienced website migration agency can make all the difference, helping you navigate technical complexity and protect your hard-earned search visibility.
Handled correctly, a migration can elevate your site’s performance, security, and long-term growth. Handled poorly, it can cause lasting damage to your organic visibility, conversions, and even your job security. According to James Foote, Head of SEO at POLARIS, “On average, websites launched without a migration plan experience a 48% decline in traffic, leads and sales for up to nine months.”
This guide explores what a website migration involves, why businesses undertake them, and how to ensure yours is a success.
What Is a Website Migration?
A website migration refers to making substantial changes to your website that can impact how it performs or appears in search results. These changes might include moving to a new domain, adopting a different CMS, switching from HTTP to HTTPS, or restructuring your URL architecture.
For example, you might change your site from http://www.sitename.com to https://www.sitename.com, or update your domain from sitename.co.uk to sitename.com. Each of these changes may seem technical, but they can have far-reaching consequences for search performance, user experience, and data integrity if not handled correctly.
Unlike a design refresh, which focuses on visual aesthetics, a migration primarily deals with the structural and technical foundation of your site.
Why Businesses Choose to Migrate
While the reasons vary, website migrations are almost always strategic. Here are the most common business cases:
- Changing Domain or Business Name: Often driven by rebranding or expansion into new markets.
- Switching from HTTP to HTTPS: To enhance data security and meet modern search engine standards.
- Adopting a New CMS: Many organisations transition to platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Magento or Sitecore for scalability and integration benefits.
- Improving User Experience (UX): A mobile-first or data-led redesign often prompts structural changes requiring a migration.
- Introducing Local or International Sites: Expanding into new markets can necessitate new subdomains or directories.
These changes are frequently tied to larger transformation projects within a business — from digital modernisation to brand repositioning — which means careful coordination is essential.
The Risks of a Poorly Managed Migration
A website migration carries real risk. Without expert planning, you could face:
- Loss of rankings and organic visibility
- Significant drops in traffic, leads, and sales
- Technical errors such as broken redirects or 404 pages
- Loss of tracking and conversion data
Foote warns: “A badly run migration project can cost you your job.”
Indeed, 80% of unmanaged site launches “roll back” within the first 30 days. The main culprit? Lack of strategy and communication. Too often, web developers lead migrations without SEO or analytics oversight, resulting in lost performance data and disjointed user experiences.
The Three Stages of a Successful Migration
Migration methodology is built on three core stages; ensuring clarity, control, and minimal disruption to business performance.
1. Pre-Migration: Plan and Prepare
Every successful migration begins with data. Audit your current site to identify your top-performing pages, backlinks, and conversion points. Create a migration map to track every URL and plan where it will redirect.
This is also the ideal time to optimise content, clean up underperforming pages, and ensure your tracking and analytics systems are correctly configured.
2. Migration: Execute with Precision
During the migration, the key is responsiveness. Update your robots.txt and XML sitemaps promptly so search engines can crawl the new site. Check for broken links, run speed tests, and confirm that redirects are functioning correctly.
Your technical SEO and development teams should work side by side to address issues as soon as they arise. The faster you act, the quicker your site will recover and stabilise.
3. Post-Migration: Monitor and Maintain
After launch, continuous monitoring is vital. Submit your new site to Google Search Console and other tracking tools to assess performance trends. Audit your redirects, and contact external partners or publications to update backlinks to your new URLs.
A migration isn’t “done” when the new site goes live — it’s only complete when performance has returned to, or surpassed, pre-migration levels.
