Moving a website to a new platform: how not to lose data or rankings

What actually makes rankings drop

Search engines do not punish a change of platform — they react to pages that suddenly became unreachable or unrecognisable. Almost every post-migration drop comes down to five causes:

• Addresses changed without redirects. The new CMS produced its own URLs, the old ones return 404 — and rankings and backlinks go with them.
• Meta tags did not travel. Title and description were generated from a template, and a page that had held its position on an exact heading for years became «Category — Shop».
• A forgotten noindex. The staging site was closed to indexing — and nobody opened it after launch.
• Duplicates from filters. The new platform spawns parameter pages, so instead of one strong page the index holds forty weak ones.
• Not everything was migrated. Some products without descriptions or photos, empty categories, missing blog posts — the total value of the site for search went down.

What must be migrated

The minimum list, without which a migration cannot be considered finished:

• Products and catalogue — with specifications, photos, categories, brands, stock and prices, together with the filters.
• Orders and customers — history with contents and statuses, accounts, delivery addresses, reviews. This is what gets «forgotten» most often, because it is not visible on the site.
• Content — pages, articles, documents, language versions.
• The SEO layer — URL structure, title and description of every page, canonical, sitemap, robots, structured data.

A word on orders and customers: technically the site will work without them, which is why cheap migrations leave them in the old database. Six months later the old hosting is switched off — and the entire purchase history goes with it. This is not a hypothetical; it is the most common loss in a migration.

301 redirects: doing them properly

The ideal migration is one where addresses do not change at all — then no redirects are needed. If the platform dictates a different structure, one simple rule applies: every old address must lead to its closest new equivalent, with a 301, in a single hop.

• Do not dump everything onto the homepage: a mass redirect to «/» is treated by Google as a soft 404, and the page simply drops out.
• Avoid chains: old → interim → new. Every link in the chain loses weight and time.
• Check by list, not by sample: every address from the old sitemap must return 200 or 301, and none may return 404.
• Do not forget www and non-www, http and https versions — those are addresses too.

The order of work that loses nothing

1. Take the reference. Before any work begins, export a full map of the old site: every address, title, description, H1 and current position. That becomes the point of comparison.
2. Build the new platform separately. The old site keeps working and selling all that time.
3. Trial migration on a copy. Check the counts: there were 4,312 products — there are 4,312. Not «about the same».
4. Redirect map. Every address from the reference gets its counterpart.
5. Switch in the lowest-traffic window. The old environment stays alive for a few days — rollback takes a minute.
6. Two weeks of monitoring. Search Console, rankings, 404s, enquiries, forms, payments.

Day-one checklist after launch

• robots.txt is open and meta noindex removed — verified by hand, not «it should be fine».
• The new sitemap.xml is generated and submitted to Search Console.
• A spot check of 20–30 old addresses: all return 200 or 301.
• Title and description of key pages match the reference.
• Forms, cart and payment pass an end-to-end test with a real test order.
• Analytics counters and conversions work; goals were not lost.
• Speed: Core Web Vitals no worse than on the old site.

The main rule of verification: an HTTP 200 does not yet mean the page is intact. Compare against the reference — content, meta tags, number of products in a category.

Cost and duration

Moving a brochure or corporate site takes 2–4 weeks; a shop with thousands of products and integrations, from 5 weeks. The price is made up of the new platform at list price (from €294 for a brochure site, from €490 for a shop) and the data migration work, whose scope becomes clear after the audit.

Do not confuse this with moving to another host without changing the engine: that is the same system on a new server, a day or two of work, from €50. If someone offers to «move your site to a new platform» for that money, they will most likely move the design and leave the data behind.