A website migration can be one of the most critical and risky events in a site’s lifecycle. While planned migrations—where every redirect, URL update, and structural change is mapped out—can protect your rankings, an unexpected migration can cause significant damage to your organic visibility.

One of the most common issues occurs when a domain’s structure changes without proper planning. For example:

• Switching from HTTP to HTTPS without setting up redirects
• Moving from www to non-www (or vice versa) unintentionally
• Altering URL structures in a redesign without a migration strategy - even something as simple as removing or adding a trailing slash to a URL.

When this happens, Google will interpret the impacted pages as an entirely new pages. From an SEO migration perspective, this means years of earned authority, backlinks, and rankings can vanish almost overnight. Organic traffic can drop sharply, sometimes taking months (or longer) to recover if action isn’t taken quickly.

Why It Happens

Unexpected migrations often occur when development teams push live updates without involving SEO experts. Changes in hosting, CMS platforms, or security configurations can inadvertently alter how Google indexes the site. Without 301 redirects, updated sitemaps, and Search Console adjustments, search engines lose the connection between the old URLs and the new ones.

How to Prevent or Recover

• Plan every migration with a detailed SEO migration checklist
• Monitor site changes closely during launches
• Use 301 redirects to preserve link equity
• Track domain and protocol changes in Google Search Console

If you’ve experienced a sudden drop in traffic after a website migration, quick action is essential. Identifying and correcting the issues early can drastically shorten recovery time.

CTO Migrations is an SEO migration service by Charles Taylor Online LLC. CTO Migrations is dedicated to helping websites and brand avoid huge traffic losses that come with site migrations.