A site migration refers to any significant structural change to a website that has the potential to affect its search rankings — this includes changing domains, moving from HTTP to HTTPS, restructuring URLs, switching content management systems, or a complete website redesign.
Site migrations are one of the highest-risk activities in SEO. Even technically sound migrations commonly cause temporary traffic dips, and poorly executed ones can cause lasting, sometimes permanent, ranking and revenue losses if not carefully planned.
A proper migration plan includes a full pre-migration audit, comprehensive URL-to-URL redirect mapping, careful monitoring of crawl errors and indexing status post-launch, and close tracking of rankings and traffic in the weeks following the change.
We manage site migrations end-to-end as part of our Technical SEO service, specifically to avoid these common pitfalls.