How to move a website without losing the URLs search engines know

Search engines know your site as a list of addresses. Change those addresses without permanent redirects, and those URLs start returning errors while the rankings attached to them fade. Most of what goes wrong in a migration comes down to that.

Start with an inventory

We crawl the current site and export every URL, including the ones that are not in the menu. We add the pages that get visits according to your analytics and the ones other sites link to. Old press coverage tends to point at pages you forgot existed.

Map every old address to a new one

Each old URL gets one permanent redirect, and its destination should be the closest match rather than the homepage. We test the whole list against the real paths before launch and crawl again the hour after. If a page has no equivalent anymore, it goes to the closest useful page or gets marked as gone on purpose.

Launch day and the weeks after

The redirects go live with the new site during a quiet hour. Then we submit the new sitemap and watch the crawl reports for errors. Some movement in rankings is normal for several weeks, sometimes longer, and no honest studio will promise otherwise. What you can control is whether every old URL has a destination. Keep the redirects in place for at least a year.