Migrations

What actually moves

Three things, and they are usually confused with each other:

• The files and the database, which is the site itself
• The domain name, which points at wherever the site is. Moving host does not mean moving your domain registration, and you can leave the domain where it is
• Email, which is often somewhere else entirely and frequently gets broken by a move done carelessly

We will ask about all three before touching anything, because the most common way a migration goes wrong is that email stops and nobody predicted it.

The redirect problem

When a site moves and its addresses change, every old address needs to point at the right new page. This is where migrations go wrong, and the damage is delayed, so it usually gets blamed on something else weeks later.

Two failure modes, both common:

Everything redirected to the homepage. It looks tidy and it destroys the value of every link pointing at the old pages. Search engines treat a redirect to an unrelated page as though the page simply vanished, so the link counts for nothing.

Old pages left returning "not found". A 404 tells search engines the page might come back, so they keep asking for it, sometimes for many months. On one site we measured, nearly half of everything Google crawled in ten days was old addresses from a previous version of the site, which is crawl budget spent on nothing.

How we work out which is which

Before anything moves we look at what the old site actually has: which addresses exist, which ones are indexed, and which ones have real links pointing at them from elsewhere. That last list is almost always shorter than people expect and almost never the pages anyone remembers.

Those get one-to-one redirects. Everything else gets handled honestly. The result is a map we can show you, not a rule that says "redirect everything to the front page".

What happens to rankings

Nothing good and nothing bad, if it is done properly. A move with correct redirects is close to invisible to search engines, and where there is a wobble it is usually brief.

What we will not tell you is that moving host will improve your rankings. Speed is a ranking factor among many and a faster server is worth having on its own merits, but anyone promising you positions in exchange for a hosting fee is selling you something that is not theirs to sell.

Before and after

Before: we take a copy of the current site, list its addresses, and agree the redirect map with you. Nothing changes while this happens and your site stays where it is.

After the switch: we check that pages below the top level load, not just the homepage, because a permissions problem shows up as an error on inner pages while the front page looks perfectly fine. We check the certificate is not just issued but actually bound to the site, which is a distinction that has caught us out before. And we check the redirects land where the map says.