Website Migration

A website migration is any move that changes where your pages live or what address they answer on. Switching to a new domain name is a migration. So is a full redesign that renames every page, a change of hosting company, or a jump from one shopping platform to another. The site may look better afterwards. Google still has to be told, page by page, what happened.

The heart of the job is one boring document. It lists every old address and, next to it, the new address that replaces it. Nothing else matters as much. Once that list exists, each old address gets a permanent redirect to its new partner, so a visitor arriving from an old search result or a five-year-old email lands where they meant to.

Two mistakes cause most of the damage. The first is redirecting everything to the home page because the list was never written. The second is a launch check nobody runs. While a new site is being built it usually sits on a test address with a rule that asks search engines to stay away. The rule is meant to be removed on launch day. When it is forgotten, the new site stays invisible for weeks and everyone blames the design.

Expect a dip. Even a careful move loses some visits for two to six weeks while search engines re-read the new addresses. A drop of ten or twenty per cent that recovers is normal. A drop of eighty per cent that does not move for a month is not a dip, it is a fault, and the redirect list is the first place to look. Save a copy of the old visitor numbers first, or you will have nothing to compare against.

Timing helps too. Do not change the address, the design and the platform in the same week if you can avoid it. Move first, prove the traffic held, then redesign. Linkysoft plans migrations that way inside a website design and development project, because when three things change at once nobody can say which one caused the drop.

A move gets harder when the site does real work. A booking screen, a customer login or an order history has data behind it, and that data must arrive complete and in the right order. Linkysoft treats those moves as a web application job with a rehearsal on a copy first, because how long a migration takes depends far more on the data than on the pages.