Website migration services, planned around the addresses your site already has

What is website migration?

A website migration is any move that changes where a site lives or how its addresses are built: a new platform, a new host, a new domain or a new structure for its pages. Many moves combine several of those. Google’s guidance treats them in two groups. A move where the addresses stay the same, such as a change of host, comes down to changing the hosting infrastructure with as little effect on search as possible. A move where the addresses change needs a map from every old address to its new one, and permanent redirects that send visitors and Googlebot along it.

Our moves are rebuilds. When we take on a site, it is rebuilt in our own system, so the platform changes even when the domain doesn’t, and every address that matters needs a decision, including the ones that keep their path.

Who needs website migration services?

A business whose site has to move and has too much to lose to move it carelessly. The reasons vary: a builder the business has outgrown, an old platform nobody can update, two sites becoming one, a rebrand onto a new domain. What the move involves depends on how large the business is:

• Established local businesses: a smaller site, sometimes on a builder such as Wix or Squarespace, where a handful of pages can carry most of the visits and links.
• Multi-location and regional businesses: one page per location or area, and each of those pages carries its own address, its own listing and often its own ads. Every one of those addresses has to land somewhere sensible after the move.
• National businesses: a large site with years of content, links from other sites and campaigns aimed at specific pages. Google says a larger site can move one section at a time, which makes problems easier to spot and fix.

A small site that keeps its platform and its addresses is a smaller job. Suff Digital’s guide puts sites under 50 pages that stay on the same platform, with few pages holding links, in its basic tier.

Will a website migration hurt my SEO?

It can for a while, and that is normal. Google says any significant change to a site can bring ranking fluctuations while it recrawls and reindexes. On link value it is direct: permanent redirects, a 301 among them, don’t cause a loss in PageRank.

When losses last, the redirect map is the first place to look. Google warns against sending many old addresses to one unrelated page, such as the home page, which it may treat as a soft 404. It also advises pointing each old address straight at its final destination, since chains of redirects add delay for visitors and not every browser follows a long one. And it suggests spacing changes out where you can: when the domain, the CMS and the layout all need to change, Google’s own example makes them one at a time.

So the move is planned around what the old site has earned, and we’re plain about what isn’t ours to promise. We do not guarantee search rankings, traffic, or uninterrupted uptime. Crawl and index problems after a move are technical SEO work.

What should you do before moving your website to a new platform or host?

Most of what protects a move happens before the switch. Before anything changes, we capture the old site:

• A full copy: every page’s words, images and files as served, saved before the old platform is cancelled. Google also says to move images and downloads such as PDFs, since they may get visits of their own.
• Every address: the pages in the sitemap and the ones only old links and menus still reach.
• Addresses others rely on: booking and payment return pages, Google Ads landing pages, the website field in your Google Business Profile, QR codes in print and directory listings.
• Tracking and verification: the Google Analytics and Search Console properties, which the new site keeps, and any verification tag in the old site’s code, which the new site has to carry or the property loses its verification.
• Our own access: a separate login for us on the old platform, so exporting never relies on your login or on a verification code sent to you each time.

For a change of host, Google suggests lowering the DNS time to live to a few hours at least a week ahead, so the switch reaches visitors faster. It also says to take the temporary blocks a build often carries, a robots.txt rule that turns crawlers away or a noindex tag, off the new copy once the move starts.

How is the redirect map built?

The map is one table: every old address, the evidence for it and what happens to it. We build the list from several sources, because none is complete on its own: the old sitemap, a crawl from the home page, the Wayback Machine’s record of earlier versions, Ahrefs’ reports of pages with search traffic and links, and Search Console when you give us access.

Each address then gets one of three outcomes:

• Kept: the path stays the same on the new site. Keeping a path needs no redirect at all, which removes one thing that can go wrong.
• Redirected: a permanent redirect, a 301 or a 308 in Google’s terms, in a single hop to the page that answers the same search. The new page has to cover what the old one ranked for.
• Left to 404: when nothing on the new site matches, the address returns a 404 or a 410, which is what Google says deleted content should return. Sending it to an unrelated page instead risks a soft 404.

The redirect rules are generated from the map, so the plan and the live rules can’t drift apart, and each rule is tested on the preview before launch.

Can you move a site off Wix or Squarespace?

Yes, and each platform hands over less than you might expect. Wix’s help center explains that its sites must be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers, though the content you build there belongs to you. Squarespace exports some content as a file in WordPress’s format, and its help center lists what doesn’t come with it: album, index, portfolio and store pages among others, more than one blog, page-specific headers and footers, video and product blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS. A site still on a trial can’t be exported at all, and images left on Squarespace’s servers can stop loading once the site is cancelled.

So we rebuild the pages in our system from the live site and whatever the platform exports, save the words and original photos first, and give each old address with visits or links its redirect. Redirects the old site already had are exported too, and pointed straight at the new pages.

What happens to your domain, DNS and email?

They stay where they are. We don’t move a domain’s registrar or nameservers. Before the switch, the domain’s current DNS records are exported and saved, and the switch changes only the web records, the ones that send visitors to the site. The mail records aren’t touched, so email isn’t part of the move.

A move to a new domain is a bigger step. Google’s Change of Address tool is for that case, and Search Console’s help says to keep the redirects for at least 180 days and to keep paying for the old domain for at least a year, so nobody else can buy it and misuse it. Google’s site-move guide goes further: keep the redirects as long as you can, generally for a year or more.

What does a migration look like in practice?

Our own site’s move is planned this way. Its redirect map lists 92 old addresses, gathered from the Wayback Machine, the live sitemap, the old menus, llms.txt, Google Ads landing pages and Ahrefs. Fourteen keep their path, 24 redirect to the page that now does their job, and 54 are left to return a 404: pages from earlier versions of the site with no clear match, no search traffic and no links from other sites. Two of the kept paths show why the evidence matters: one is printed as a QR code on business cards, and another is linked from invoices. The old site stays live, unedited, until the switch, which will move the domain between two hosting projects on Vercel and leave the DNS records as they are.

The Alvy Logistics website is a rebuild too. It is now a 70-page Astro site in our own system, and we run it with Alvy. Alvy is owned by our co-founder Noah Alvarez, and DSI is an Alvy company.

How do you check a migration worked?

On the live site first. Each redirected address should answer with a permanent redirect and land on its new page in one hop, and each kept address should load with no redirect at all. Google’s URL Inspection tool tests single addresses, and a script tests the whole map at once.

Then in Search Console. The Sitemaps report shows how many of the new site’s addresses are indexed, and the page reports list old addresses that now return an error. Ahrefs shows links from other sites still pointing at addresses that no longer exist, and any of those with real links behind them gets a redirect.

How long to keep watching varies with the site. Suff Digital’s guide puts the monitoring for a mid-size site at 30 days against a traffic baseline, and says the first 30 days catch the errors that cost the most traffic. Its point about the baseline is worth taking: skip it, the guide says, and you can’t prove what the migration did.

What is on a website migration checklist?

A short version, in the order it runs:

1. Capture: save the old site in full, with its words, images, files and existing redirects.
2. Inventory: list every address from the sitemap, a crawl, archives, Ahrefs and Search Console.
3. Map: give each address one outcome (kept, redirected in one hop, or left to 404), and update internal links to the new addresses.
4. Test: check the new templates and every redirect on a preview, and carry over the verification tags and tracking.
5. Switch: launch at a quieter time for your traffic, as Google suggests, lift any crawl blocks and submit the new sitemap.
6. Watch: follow crawling, indexing, rankings and leads, fix old addresses that error, and keep the redirects for at least a year.

Suff Digital’s checklist runs the same way, from an inventory of every current URL to monitoring crawling, indexing, rankings and conversions after the switch. If your site has to move, book a 15-minute call and bring its address and anywhere its links are printed.