Migrating a website to a new engine without losing SEO
Switching engines is a technical operation, but its consequences show up first in search. The right order of steps brings the risk of a drop close to zero; the wrong order erases years of work in a week.
Pre-migration audit: what to capture
Before the move, take a full snapshot of the current state: every indexed page, its title and description, the internal link structure, and ranking data for the last three months. Without that snapshot you cannot verify nothing was lost after launch.
Robots.txt and the current sitemap.xml are checked separately — the new platform regenerates them from scratch, and forgetting to carry over rules from the old robots.txt can let search engines index service pages that used to be blocked.
URL structure — keep it, or change it deliberately
If the new engine can keep the existing address structure, that is the best outcome: nothing needs redirecting and the ranking risk is minimal. That is possible when the new platform supports flexible URL settings rather than rigid templates.
When the structure has to change — say the old CMS generated addresses like ?id=123 — the transition is unavoidable, and the old-to-new address map becomes the central document of the whole migration project.
The order of technical steps
The new site is built and populated on a staging subdomain blocked from indexing via meta robots and a password. It only goes live once the redirects have been manually tested against the audit list — a minimum of 30 to 50 key pages.
At the moment the DNS or domain switches, the new sitemap.xml is submitted to Search Console and Yandex.Webmaster immediately, and a recrawl of the main pages is triggered through the URL inspection tool — this speeds up reindexing by several days.
The first two weeks after launch
The crawl error report is checked daily: a rise in 404 or 5xx errors is the first sign that some redirects failed. The usual cause is dynamic pages that never made it into the original audit list.
Keyword rankings are monitored separately from overall visibility — a brief dip of three to five days during reindexing is normal, while a drop lasting more than two weeks demands an immediate check of redirects and meta tags.
Timeline and cost
Migrating a mid-sized site while preserving SEO takes two to four weeks depending on page count and how complex the old engine is. A simple 10–15 page brochure site moves in two weeks; a catalog of several hundred products takes closer to a month.
The cost of such a migration typically runs 6,000,000 to 10,000,000 UZS — covering the audit, the technical redirect setup, and ranking monitoring for the first month after launch, not just the design transfer itself.