A website migration is any move that changes where your pages live: a new platform, a new domain, or a new set of URLs. Search engines hold years of records pointing at the old addresses, and those records do not update themselves. The job is to move the site and carry the rankings, the links, and the traffic across with it.
Book a free consultation →Three different projects get called a website migration, and they carry the same risk for the same reason.
The risk in all three is identical. A search engine's record of your business is a list of addresses. Every ranking, every link anyone ever pointed at you, every directory citation refers to one specific URL. Change the address without leaving a forwarding instruction and the page does not move. It disappears, and a page with no history takes its place.
Nobody puts a migration on the to-do list by itself. It arrives attached to something else:
This page is about hiring somebody to run that move. It sits underneath the wider SEO program, where the ongoing work picks up once the dust settles.
Migration gets sold as care, as in we will be careful. Careful is not a deliverable. Here is what you should be able to point at when the job is done.
Designing the new site is not part of this. That is custom web design or web development, and the migration plan runs alongside the build rather than after it.
Since 2008 we have worked from Orlando with local service businesses around the country, so this runs on email, screen shares, and one date on the calendar everybody agrees to in advance.
Before anything gets built. The inventory and the ranked list come first, because they change decisions about the new site. Pages worth keeping get a home in the new structure. Pages being retired get a destination on purpose. Doing this after the build is how a redirect map ends up full of guesses.
What we need from you. Access to the current site and its host, the domain registrar and whoever controls DNS, and Search Console and analytics for both the old site and the new one. Then two decisions only you can make: which pages are being retired deliberately, and whether the old domain stays under your control.
A freeze. Once the map is built, the old site stops changing. Pages published in the middle of a migration are the ones that get missed.
A pre-launch pass on staging. Redirect rules tested against the full old address list while they are still off the public site. Titles, headings and markup compared page by page against what the old page had. And the setting that keeps staging out of search checked again on launch day.
The launch window. A quiet hour, not a Friday afternoon. Redirects go live at the same moment the new site does, the DNS change is scheduled so your email is not caught up in it, and somebody stays at the desk for the first hour.
Then the unglamorous part. On a domain move, the change of address is filed with Google and the old domain stays registered and pointing. Recrawls are requested for the pages that matter most. We run first-party lead dashboards on more than 20 of the sites we manage, so through a move you can watch calls and forms arrive close to real time instead of waiting a month to learn something broke.
Search engines work through a changed site over days and weeks, not hours, so early movement is ordinary and is not a verdict. How long SEO takes covers the ordinary clock.
This is worth real money on some moves and close to nothing on others. What separates them is how much history the current site has to lose.
Worth paying for if:
Skip it if:
If you are not sure what shape the current site is in, run it through our free website report card before you talk to anybody about moving it. No email wall, and it will tell you whether what you have is worth carrying across as it stands.
A migration is a dated event with a before and an after. Almost everything around it is ongoing, which makes it easy to buy the wrong piece. Here is the division of labor.
How the whole program is sequenced month to month is on the SEO service page.
There is no published price for a migration, because the size of the job is set by the number of addresses and the state of the records, not by the size of the business. We quote flat after a free consult, once somebody has crawled what you have and seen where it is going.
As a worked example, say a thirty page service business moving from a builder to a new domain. Count the blog and the old service area pages and the real list runs to a few hundred addresses, most of them mapping cleanly. That job has an obvious finish line. Now imagine a store with a few thousand product and category URLs the old platform generated on its own. Same work, very different size of project, and a quote should say so rather than average the two.
More often this is not a separate purchase at all. When we are building the new site, the migration planning is part of that project, and custom builds run $3,500 to $12,000+ one time. How much a website costs breaks down what moves that number, and how long it takes to build a website covers the calendar.
If you want somebody watching the site after the move and not only through it, that is the ongoing SEO program, which runs $1,500 to $3,500 a month for most businesses and $3,500 to $7,500 a month in competitive metros or for multi-location companies. How much SEO costs explains what separates those two, and the free what should you pay tool reads your budget straight.
Everything is month to month. No long-term contract, no early termination fee. You own the domain, the new site, the content, the redirect map and every account attached to them. Ask for a quote, or call or text (407) 694-2055 and tell us what is moving and why.
Not automatically. If the new design goes live on the same domain with every address unchanged, that is a redesign, and it needs a launch check rather than a migration project. The moment the addresses change, even by one folder in the path, it is a migration. Most redesigns do change addresses quietly, because the new platform builds them a different way, so compare the two URL lists before deciding which one you are buying.
Nobody honest promises otherwise, so here is the real answer. Some movement in the first weeks is normal while search engines work through the changes, and it usually settles. What is not normal, and does not fix itself with patience, is losing pages because their addresses were never redirected anywhere. That second thing is what a migration plan controls. We do not promise rankings, before a move or after one.
Longer than most people assume. Search engines stop asking for the old addresses within months, but links on other websites, printed material, saved bookmarks and stale directory listings keep sending real people there for years. On a domain move that means keeping the old domain registered and pointing rather than letting it lapse the year after launch. It is a small annual cost against traffic you already paid for once.
No, though it is more work than doing it in the right order. The old address list can usually be rebuilt from Search Console history, analytics records, the old sitemap and the sites still linking to you, and the redirect map gets written after the fact. Sooner is better, because search engines eventually stop requesting pages that have returned errors for months, and the record fades with them.
It can, which is exactly why the DNS cutover gets planned instead of improvised. Email and the website are separate records on the same domain, and a rushed change can take the mail down with the site. We write down what currently points where before anything is edited, and schedule the change for a window when somebody is watching, rather than finding out from a customer who could not reach you.
Yes, and it is common. We work alongside your developer or your in-house team. We own the inventory, the redirect map, the carried-over titles and markup, and the verification. They own the build. The one requirement is being involved before the new URL structure is locked in, because a map written against finished pages is a map full of compromises nobody wanted.
SEO services · Technical SEO · SEO Audit · Keyword Research · Free website report card · All services
Send us the site you have now and the plan for the new one, and we will tell you what is at risk and what the move costs before anything changes. Call or text (407) 694-2055, or email [email protected].
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.