Guide
Why migrations cause organic traffic drops
A migration changes URLs, templates, internal links or the entire domain. Google has to recrawl and reassign signals to every new URL, and any missing redirect or broken template cuts that transfer.
The most common drops come from three causes: URLs with traffic and no 301, an indexed staging site or robots.txt blocks reaching production, and content lost in the redesign.
The 5 phases of a safe SEO migration
The checklist organizes 30 points into five phases. The first two prevent the most problems.
Phase 1. Planning
Define reason and scope, freeze a traffic, ranking and indexing benchmark, and build the full URL inventory from Search Console, analytics, the sitemap and a crawl.
Phase 2. Staging
Password-protected staging, 1:1 mapping of old to new URLs and a crawl comparison between the live site and staging.
Phase 3. Redirects
301 redirects for every URL with traffic, backlinks or rankings, no chains or loops, and internal links pointing straight to the new URL.
Phase 4. Launch day
Remove indexing blocks, verify the new robots.txt, submit updated sitemaps and monitor 4xx and 5xx errors for the first 48 hours.
Phase 5. Post-migration
Compare indexing and rankings against the benchmark weekly, review 404s with residual traffic and close with a report at 8 weeks.
How long traffic takes to recover
In a well-executed migration, a few weeks of fluctuation is normal while Google processes redirects. If traffic is still below benchmark at 8 weeks, phase 5 of the checklist works as a diagnostic.