The new site is nicer and faster than the old one, it launched, and a couple of weeks later there are fewer requests. Often the reason is not the design. The old page addresses that search engines knew and other sites linked to simply stopped existing after the move.
Moving to a new site is a task of its own, not the last day of development. Below is a plan that helps keep what the old site already earned: search positions, links, and the path clients are used to.
A list of old addresses
Before launch, collect every address of the old site: from its sitemap, from webmaster tools, from analytics. Mark the pages that bring visitors and requests. Losing those is what shows most.
If the old site runs on a CMS, it may have addresses nobody remembers: archives, tags, print pages. They belong on the list too, so you can decide what to do with them.
Keep or redirect
It is best when important addresses stay the same. If the structure changes, every old address needs a 301 redirect to the closest new page by meaning. The old page for a service leads to the new page for the same service, not to the home page.
- One-to-one redirects, with no chains through several addresses
- All variants of an address lead to one place: with and without www, http and https
- Pages with no replacement honestly return 404 instead of sending everything to the home page
Move content, do not lose it
Copy from pages that ranked well should be moved with care. You can improve the presentation, but if you remove the content people found the page by, the positions leave with it. The same goes for titles and descriptions: change them, but on purpose.
Check that analytics counters, webmaster tool verifications, the form, and every integration moved over. A new site without a counter looks in reports like a site without visitors for its first weeks.
Launch day
- The old site is backed up, and the backup is stored separately
- Redirects are on and checked against the list of old addresses
- The new sitemap is in place, and robots.txt does not block indexing
- The form sends requests, and a test request arrived
- The sitemap is submitted in webmaster tools
A common mistake: the staging version was hidden from search, and that block moved to the live site. Check robots.txt and meta tags within the first hour.
The first weeks after
Watch for 404 errors in webmaster tools and in the server logs. Every address that shows up there is someone who came through an old link. Add a redirect for it. Do not shut down the old hosting right away: until everything is checked, you may need to go back to it.
Some movement in positions after a move is normal, because search engines need time to process the new addresses. A sharp and lasting drop usually points to missed redirects or blocked indexing, and that is worth looking for immediately.
You need access to the old domain and hosting before the move, as the note on domain, hosting, and access explains. If speed changes along with the move, see the note on speed on a phone. To plan the move of your site, use the contact form.