What usually goes wrong
Most migrations that damage rankings fail in one of four ways: URLs change without redirects, the staging site’s block on crawling ships to production, the address or phone number quietly changes in the process, or nobody records what the numbers looked like beforehand so the damage is invisible until it is entrenched.
Local businesses carry an extra risk that general migration advice misses: your Business Profile and citations point at specific URLs and phone numbers. Change those without updating the listings and you break the entity consistency that local ranking depends on.
Before: record and plan
- Export everything. Full URL list, current rankings for the searches that matter, Search Console performance, and analytics for the last twelve months. Without a baseline you cannot prove or diagnose a drop.
- Map every old URL to a new one. One to one wherever possible. Anything with no equivalent goes to the closest relevant page, never a blanket redirect to the homepage.
- List every place your URL or phone number appears externally — Business Profile, directories, review platforms, social profiles. The citation audit method works here.
- Note anything that must not change: business name, address, phone number. A migration is not the moment to also rebrand.
If the phone number genuinely has to change, do that as a separate exercise weeks apart, so you can tell which change caused what.
During: the launch checklist
| Check | Why it bites | |
|---|---|---|
| Redirects live | Every old URL 301s to its mapped destination | The single most common cause of a migration drop |
| No staging blocks | robots.txt and any noindex tags removed | A blanket block can deindex the site in days |
| Canonicals | Point at the new URLs, not the old or staging ones | Splits signals invisibly |
| Schema intact | Business and service markup carried across | Quietly lost in a redesign |
| Sitemap | Regenerated with new URLs, resubmitted | Slows recrawling considerably |
| Analytics | Tracking present on every template | You lose the ability to see the impact |
Test the redirects with a crawl of the old URL list rather than spot-checking a few. Chains and loops are common and easy to miss by hand.
After: the fortnight that matters
- Update the Business Profile website link, and every citation pointing at a changed URL.
- Watch Search Console coverage daily for a fortnight — a spike in crawl errors or excluded pages is the earliest warning you will get.
- Compare rankings against the baseline weekly, not daily. Short-term fluctuation during recrawling is normal and panicking about it causes worse decisions.
- Check the enquiry path end to end. Forms silently breaking during a migration is common, and analytics often cannot see it — the measurement guide explains why embedded forms are a blind spot.
- Expect some movement for a few weeks. Expect recovery. If nothing has recovered after a month, something is structurally wrong rather than settling.
Keep the old URL list and the redirect map for at least a year. Migrations get revisited, and reconstructing that mapping later is painful.