#sitemigration

In my latest guide, you’ll learn: 👉 When to keep new URLs live vs. noindex 👉 Best practices for 301 redirects 👉 How to manage crawl budget & XML sitemaps 👉 Typical timelines for Google Search Console stabilization 👉 How to preserve link equity and avoid ranking drops

What Is Website Migration? Learn from Tatva Tech Digital Experts

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, maintaining a high-performing, SEO-optimized website is critical. That’s why Tatva Tech Digital has published a comprehensive guide to help businesses understand what is website migration, how to approach it, and when to seek professional website migration services.

What Is Website Migration?

Website migration refers to any major change to a website that can impact its visibility on search engines. This includes switching domains, moving to a new hosting platform, redesigning the website, or changing URL structures.

Many website owners are unaware of the risks involved with migration — such as traffic loss, broken links, or SEO ranking drops. Tatva Tech Digital explains what is website migration in simple terms to help businesses avoid these costly mistakes.

Website Migration Services by Tatva Tech Digital

Tatva Tech Digital offers a full suite of professional website migration services, including:

1. Technical and SEO pre-migration audits

2. Safe transfer of content, media, and databases

3. 301 redirect planning and implementation

4. Search engine reindexing strategies

5. Post-migration performance tracking

Whether you're moving to a new CMS, changing your site structure, or rebranding your domain, these services ensure minimal disruption and maximum retention of SEO value.

How to Do Website Migration: Step-by-Step

Tatva Tech Digital’s guide outlines how to do website migration properly. Their recommended process includes:

1. Pre-Migration Planning – Backup your site, audit SEO performance, and set clear migration goals.

2. Testing in Staging – Use a staging environment to test design, structure, and functionality.

3. 301 Redirects – Properly redirect old URLs to new ones to preserve link equity.

4.SEO Checks – Optimize on-page elements, metadata, and internal linking.

5. Post-Migration Monitoring – Track traffic, fix broken links, and ensure Google indexing.

This step-by-step approach helps businesses execute migrations without compromising SEO or user experience.

Why Website Migration Is Critical

Businesses grow, platforms evolve, and user expectations change. Whether you're upgrading your CMS, improving UX, or switching to a faster server, website migration is often necessary. But doing it wrong can have serious consequences.

Tatva Tech Digital’s guide gives website owners the confidence to migrate effectively — or the option to hire experts to handle the process end-to-end.

📌 Read the full article here:

DNS TTL Explained – Why It Matters for WordPress Websites

Types of Website Migrations

Protocol change

Migrating a website from HTTP to HTTPS is an example of a protocol change.

Subdomain or subfolder change

When a company chooses to move from one ccTLDs into subdomains or subfolders. Eg. www.example.com.au to www.au.example.com or www.example.com/au

Domain name change

This usually happens when a business is rebranding and has to switch from one domain to another. Eg. www.example.com to www.sample.com

Top-level domain change

This happens when a company decides to either launch the business abroad or limit it to a certain country. Eg. www.example.com to www.example.com.au or vice versa. 

Site structure changes

These are improvements to the layout of the site, which usually affect the internal reference and URL structure of the page.

Replatforming

This is when a website is switched from one platform to another. Eg. switching from WordPress to Shopify.

Mobile setup changes

Things such as shifting to a mobile setup, indexing applications or creating a PWA website are often called partial website migrations.

Content Migration

Rewriting, consolidation or pruning of content can have a major impact on the visibility of organic search.

Redesigns

This can be anything from minor design changes to a complete website revision with major changes in code and copy.

The things to keep in mind while you are looking to migrate your website from one domain to another:

Calculate the risks and brace for the consequences.

Create backups and download them.

Pay attention to the URL structure.

Consider redirecting the URL as a major factor for SEO.

Use the change of address tool in the search console to communicate the site migration at the domain level.

Maintain the same directory and folder structure.

Remove broken links and 404 pages.

Set up a new directory for robots.txt.

Prioritize websites with a higher authority.

Plan your rebranding strategies.

Replatforming

This type of site migration involves shifting to a new platform or a CMS. For instance, if your website previously used WordPress as its CMS and you shift to Magento, that would require a website migration. This type of website migration can also involve redesigning websites and even URL changes.

Mobile setup changes

Many technical procedures for a site’s mobile setup can also involve partial or full website migration. These procedures can include building an AMP site, enabling app indexing, coding a PWA website, and more. When an existing website for mobile devices is replaced by an app, PWA, or an AMP, that also requires site migration.

Content Migration

This type of site migration involves a major update in the content of a website. This can include major content rewrites, content pruning, and consolidation. These activities cause a huge impact on a website’s SEO and its search visibility, and can affect your website’s taxonomy, internal linking, and more.

Structural changes

This type of site migration is caused by making significant changes in your website’s taxonomy, navigation, and changes or updates in website architecture. This can affect the internal linking in your website, its navigation as a whole, and user journeys.

Hybrid migrations

 Wow, what a few days! I must be a sucker for punishment, as this was by far the biggest change I’ve ever made to my website. I certainly learnt a few new things, but there were quite a few challenges too. This is a summary of what I did:

 Hosting change – I moved away from DigitalOcean to HostWorld (VPS-3 package). Both are VPS providers, and certainly DigitalOcean is fast, but their costs are a bit prohibitive for me where I need to add more storage etc. So a noticed a while back someone had recommended HostWorld, and there I could save about 30% with double the RAM and a good 50% more disc storage.

 Hosting technology change – I was using Softaculous scripting as a sort of panel manager to install and upgrade all the services I ran. It generally worked very well, and included e-mail hosting, but it duplicates PHP and some other stuff, so depending on whether you are working via it or the command line, you have to be very careful what version of PHP you are running otherwise it can break things. My Drupal’s compose and drush commands ended up getting really broken, and I had to keep fixing it. Moving from Drupal 8 to 9 became impossible, and Drupal 8 was now at end of life. Although Softaculous is only $2 pm I thought maybe I should also try a change of technology on that front… so I decided to try running all my hosting services in separate docker containers. This took an entire day to get right (with wanting to have one shared MariaDB database for all my containers) as all the tutorials and videos mostly show single service setups. So I learnt a lot on this front and intend to do a video and post dedicated to just this factor. It was not all roses and sunshine though as I lost about 2 days trying to figure out how to rehost my e-mail, but I had a lot of complications with using the same base URL between my mail server and website, so had to abandon that for now. The main advantages for me with going with docker containers are, they are self-contained with everything they need to run, so I’m expecting (hoping) that updates will be easier and way quicker, and of course also that I have Nginx Proxy Manager now playing a central gatekeeper as far as managing access and redirects goes. They should also be easier in future to be migrated to other hosting providers.

 Content Management System change – I was on WordPress way back in 2018 (as I found out from finding my old remote backups in DropBox) and I had migrated to Drupal for speed and flexibility (and of course I love to try new things), but like I said, the upgrades were becoming a nightmare. Drupal itself worked well, and I was very happy with it, but I had to decide whether to try running it in a container, or rather jump back to WP. I decided on the latter and bought an extension that did the conversion for me into a WP site. I spent another day or so getting the right plugins and doing the more notable fixes that needed to be done. It’s actually good to be back on WordPress, as there is a plugin for everything, although I do note that very few of the better ones are now truly fully free.

 So apart from the learning curve needed to go from 15% docker knowledge to 50%, the usual problem with switching my domain name away from one provider to another also reared its head. It did not really result in any significant website downtime, but many may have noticed some images were not loading while the WP was resolving to a secondary domain name for a while. Once the DNS had settled down, and I set WP back to it’s primary domain name, it all looked good.

 So what remains, is still some tweaking and tidying up (especially for the formatting of my big open source repository page), and I also need to finish spinning up my NextCloud, Wallabag, Webtrees, etc sites. My photos site is still live at the old hosting on its original domain name, and I need to set aside a day to a start testing it’s import.

 See https://gadgeteer.co.za/hosting-migration-and-site-migration-back-to-wordpress-2-to-3-dec-2021/

The internet is an ever evolving place so to keep up a site should also be subjected to change periodically, this periodic change is known as site Migration.

Generally site Migration has an tendency in creating a loss in revenue and traffic and it is impossible to entirely migrate without losing any traffic or revenue, however this can be avoided if every single step is well planned and executed.