SEO Migration

A site migration is a broad term used to describe any significant change to a website’s environment, URL structure, design, or platform that can impact its search engine visibility. Think of it like moving your physical store to a new address. If you don't forward your mail, update your sign, or tell your customers, you’re going to lose business.

In the short term, a temporary fluctuation or slight dip in traffic is completely normal. Google needs time to crawl, process, and re-index the new structure. However, a well-executed migration should stabilize within a few weeks and can ultimately lead to traffic growth. A poorly executed migration, on the other hand, can decimate your organic visibility overnight.

You need an SEO website migration agency when you are updating your site for:

• Changing your content management system
• Upgrading to the latest version of your content management system
• Changing your domain name
• Changing your subdomain or subfolder
• Transferring to a different server or site host
• Switching from HTTP to HTTPS
• Changing the site structure or navigation
• Changing design or user experience elements

Yes. Many new sites experience much lower search visibility, rankings and traffic than established ones. This decline often takes months or even years, and a considerable amount of money, to recover from.

To avoid this situation, work with an experienced SEO website migration agency that can guide you through the process and ensure your move is successful and delivers on your investment.

Every SEO site migration carries risk. However, at Zelst, we work with you and your web developers to orchestrate a smooth migration, identifying and resolving snags before they become problems.

Want to discuss your site migration or find out more about how we can help? Get in touch today to speak to our team of SEO experts.

For small to medium-sized sites, traffic typically stabilises within 4 to 6 weeks, provided your redirect strategy is flawless. For massive enterprise websites with hundreds of thousands of URLs, the re-indexing process is slower and can take several months for Google to fully figure things out, however with a carefully planned, perfectly implemented and painstakingly tested SEO SIte Migration from Zelst this can be reduced significantly, as you may read in our SEO Site Migration case studies.

URL Redirect Mapping. You must map your old URLs to their exact (or most relevant) new counterparts using 301 (permanent) redirects. This transfers the "link equity" (ranking power) your old pages spent years building to the new ones. Avoid blanket redirects or mass redirects to one page, such as the home page at all costs.

Many web developers understand SEO but few are experts and you must never rely on your web developers only to ensure your SEO continues to perform. 

Other significant SEO Fails we frequently see include setting the robots.txt file to block all Search and LLM bots, forgetting to populate key metadata, removing huge blocks of content which previously brought in quality traffic, setting up redirect loops which crash the site, failing to install a properly configured SSL, setting up all redirects as 302s,  not setting up a sitemap, and so on.

Google officially recommends keeping redirects active for at least one year. However, the gold standard in the SEO industry and Zelst policy is to keep them in place indefinitely. As long as those old URLs still have backlinks pointing to them from other websites, turning off the redirects means losing that authority forever.

Always launch during your lowest traffic period. Look at your historical data in Google Analytics to identify your lowest days and hours - usually, this is late at night, over a weekend, or during a seasonal lull. Launching a new site right before your peak sales season, a long bank holiday weekend, Christmas or Easter, or when key people associated with the new site and migration are away, is a recipe for high-stakes panic, at best, or a disaster at worse.

For large sites, plan at least 3-6 months in advance. This gives you time to audit existing content, map redirects, build and test a staging environment, notify stakeholders, and set up monitoring. Rushing a migration is one of the most common causes of severe ranking losses. Small sites with minimal URL changes may need only 4-6 weeks.

A 301 is a permanent redirect and passes the majority of link equity to the destination URL. This is what you should/MUST use for migrations. A 302 is a temporary redirect and signals to Google that the old URL will return; link equity is not reliably transferred. Using 302s by mistake is a common error that can cause rankings to stall on the new site for weeks or months

It’s usually best to minimise major content changes during migration. Making too many updates at once can make it harder to diagnose SEO issues if rankings fluctuate. Zelst recommend that if you are to change the content for the new site, you actually publish it to the existing (old) site first and allow this to bed in before making the new pages live.

Not necessarily. If managed correctly with proper redirects, updated sitemaps, and strong technical SEO practices, a domain migration can maintain most of the website’s existing authority and rankings. Zelst have migrated many domains with minimal loss of visibility.