Why migrations go wrong
The traffic a buyer pays for can evaporate if the migration is mishandled — broken redirects, changed URLs, lost metadata, or downtime can all cost search rankings that took years to build. Whether you're the seller ensuring a clean handover or the buyer protecting your new asset, a careful, documented migration is what keeps the value intact through the transfer.
Prepare before you move anything
Start with a full backup and a complete crawl of the existing site so you have a record of every URL, redirect, and piece of metadata. Document the current structure, note the top pages by traffic, and record baseline rankings and traffic so you can detect any drop afterward. Migrating without this map is how sites silently lose pages no one notices until traffic falls.
Preserve URLs and redirects
The single biggest rule: keep URLs identical where possible, and where they must change, set up proper 301 redirects from every old URL to its new equivalent. Preserve titles, metadata, and structured data. If the platform or hosting changes, verify the site renders identically and that nothing important — robots rules, canonical tags, sitemaps — was altered in the move.
Monitor closely afterward
Right after migration, resubmit the sitemap, check search console for crawl errors, and watch rankings and traffic daily for a couple of weeks. Small dips can be normal briefly, but sustained drops mean something broke — usually a redirect or a blocked resource — and need fixing fast. Catching issues early is the difference between a blip and a permanent loss of the traffic that justified the sale price.
- Botched migrations can erase the traffic a buyer paid for.
- Back up and crawl the site to map every URL first.
- Keep URLs the same or 301-redirect every change.
- Resubmit the sitemap and monitor rankings for two weeks.
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