An industrial parts supplier moved a seven-year-old website off an aging shared host. The agency flipped DNS on a Friday night. By Monday, inbound enquiries had dropped from an average of 11 a day to one. The cause was not exotic: 1,400 product URLs changed from /product.php?id=88 to /products/bearing-6204, and nobody wrote a single redirect. Organic traffic fell 62% within 14 days and took five months to claw back to 80% of its former level. Moving files was never the hard part. Mapping every old URL to exactly one new URL — with no gaps — is the whole job.
When a migration project makes sense (and when it does not)
Treat migration as its own project with its own budget, not something bolted onto a redesign.
| Start the migration now | Leave it alone, or do something else |
|---|---|
| The host is end-of-life and the PHP version can no longer be patched | You only want a new colour scheme — swap the theme, keep the URLs |
| URL structure is a mess (query strings, inconsistent casing) and indexing suffers | Site is under three months old with fewer than 500 monthly visits — rebuilding is cheaper |
| You are folding a subdomain back into the main domain, or merging brands | You are in peak season (November retail, for instance) — wait for the trough |
| You are changing CMS (WordPress to Laravel, Wix to self-hosted) and want to keep rankings | Nobody can produce a complete URL inventory or a restorable database dump |
| You are adding a CDN to bring LCP under the 2.5-second threshold | The company is rebranding to a new domain within three months — move once, not twice |
Four ways to do this, compared
| Approach | Cost band | Upside | Downside |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-place upgrade (same URLs, new host or PHP) | NT$8,000–25,000 | Near-zero SEO risk; Google classifies it as a low-risk move | Does nothing about URL structure or architectural debt |
| Host-provided migration (Cloudways, Kinsta free migrations) | NT$0–3,000, usually bundled | Files and database land fast, often within 48 hours | Files only — no redirect mapping, no index verification |
| Rebuild on SaaS (Shopify, Wix, Webflow) | NT$900–3,500/month plus NT$30,000+ build | No ops burden, quick to launch | URL structure is dictated by the platform; the next migration costs more |
| Full migration project (this article) | NT$45,000–250,000 | Verifiable 301 coverage, controlled ranking risk, rollback path | Needs 30–45 days and real cooperation from whoever holds the old site |
The six-stage, 34-day process
| Stage | Timing | Deliverable | Tools |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Inventory | D1–D5 | Complete URL list, top 100 pages by traffic, inbound link sources | Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Google Search Console, GA4 |
| 2. Redirect map | D6–D12 | Old-to-new 301 CSV at 100% coverage, including paginated and tag pages | Google Sheets, Notion |
| 3. Build staging | D13–D30 | Password-protected staging with noindex, content migrated, internal links rewritten | Staging subdomain, Figma, WP All Import |
| 4. Pre-cutover checks | D31–D33 | DNS TTL lowered to 300s, full backup, rollback script, 404 monitoring armed | Cloudflare DNS, rsync |
| 5. Cutover | D34, 02:00–06:00 local | DNS repointed, noindex removed, SSL live, new sitemap submitted | Let's Encrypt, Cloudflare, Search Console |
| 6. Post-launch watch | D34–D90 | Weekly 404 report, index coverage, keyword position deltas | Search Console, UptimeRobot, GA4 |
If the domain itself changes, stage 5 also includes filing the Change of Address tool in Search Console. A host-only move with identical URLs does not need it.
What it actually costs
- Small brochure site (under 100 pages, URLs unchanged): NT$25,000–45,000, roughly 20–35 hours
- Mid-size corporate site or small store (500–3,000 URLs, URLs change): NT$80,000–180,000, roughly 70–140 hours
- Multilingual or multi-subdomain consolidation (10,000+ URLs): from NT$250,000
The line items that get forgotten typically add 15–30% on top:
- Overlapping hosting during the rollback window: 2–3 months at NT$1,500–8,000/month — this is insurance, do not cut it
- Domain renewal: a .com.tw through a TWNIC accredited registrar runs about NT$800–1,200/year
- SSL: Let's Encrypt is free; an OV or EV certificate is NT$3,000–15,000/year
- Cloudflare Pro at US$25/month (about NT$800); a Screaming Frog licence at £199/year (about NT$8,200)
- Manual content migration: 8–15 hours per 100 pages at NT$1,200–1,800/hour
- Ninety days of post-launch SEO monitoring and patching: NT$15,000–30,000
ScriptWalker's Site Migration Package starts at NT$45,000 and covers full URL inventory, the 301 map, cutover, and 30 days of monitoring.
What clients expect versus what happens
| The expectation | The reality |
|---|---|
| "Copy the files, change DNS, it's an evening's work" | Moving files is about 15% of the hours; 60% goes into URL mapping and verification |
| "The new site is faster, so rankings should improve" | Two to four weeks of volatility is normal; a dip before recovery is the healthy curve |
| "We can kill the old host immediately and save a month" | Keep the old environment at least 60 days — switch it off and rollback stops existing |
| "Once the 301s are in, we're done" | Google advises keeping redirects for at least 180 days and longer while old URLs still receive traffic |
| "Internal links will update themselves" | Hard-coded old URLs inside post bodies do not move; they need a database-level rewrite |
Six traps and the fix for each
- Redirecting every old URL to the homepage. Google treats that as a soft 404 and the equity evaporates — map one-to-one to the closest matching new page.
- Leaving staging's noindex or robots.txt Disallow in place. On cutover day, run three representative pages through the URL Inspection tool before you call it done.
- DNS TTL still sitting at 86,400 seconds. Drop it to 300 seconds 48 hours before cutover so rollback takes five minutes, not a day.
- Using 302 "temporary" redirects. A 302 signals the old URL is coming back. Use 301 for permanent moves.
- Skipping non-HTML assets. PDF catalogues, images, the old /feed and sitemap.xml all carry links and index entries — put them in the map.
- Cutting over on a Friday night. Nobody is around when it breaks. Move to a Tuesday pre-dawn slot with a full team on deck that day.
Success metrics and the 90-day roadmap
- Days 1–30 — stability. Weekly 404 count trending to zero, indexed pages back above 90% of the old site, UptimeRobot availability at or above 99.9%, no redirect errors in Search Console.
- Days 31–60 — traffic. Organic sessions back to 85–95% of pre-migration levels, top 20 keywords within three positions of their old rank, conversion rate no lower than 90% of baseline.
- Days 61–90 — growth. Organic traffic above 105% of baseline, LCP inside 2.5 seconds, old host decommissioned (redirects stay until day 180), and a full crawl confirming no orphan pages.
Decision checklist
Three or more "no" answers means you are not ready to cut over yet.
- ☐ I have a complete URL inventory, not just the pages in the navigation
- ☐ I know which 50 pages carry the most traffic
- ☐ I have an old-to-new 301 map with 100% coverage
- ☐ I know which external sites link to me (press, directories, partners)
- ☐ Database and files have a verified, restorable backup
- ☐ DNS TTL was lowered to 300 seconds at least 48 hours out
- ☐ The new SSL certificate is issued and auto-renewing
- ☐ Removing staging's noindex has a named owner and a written step
- ☐ The old host is paid up for at least another 60 days
- ☐ Rollback criteria are written down (for example: revert if traffic drops 40% in 48 hours)
- ☐ The cutover window avoids promotional periods and Fridays
- ☐ Post-launch monitoring owner and cadence are in the contract
FAQ
Will a migration always cost me rankings?
A pure host move with identical URLs usually produces no observable effect. Once URLs or domains change, short-term volatility is close to unavoidable: a mild dip in weeks one and two, recovery by weeks four to eight. A drop deeper than 30% that has not recovered after four weeks is not volatility — it is a gap in the redirect map.
How long do the 301s need to stay?
Google's guidance is a minimum of 180 days, and longer while any traffic still arrives via the old URLs. In practice external links never update themselves, so we keep the redirect rules permanently; the running cost is effectively zero.
How much downtime does the DNS switch actually cause?
With TTL lowered to 300 seconds and the new site already running on production hardware, real unavailability is usually under five minutes and most visitors notice nothing. Long outages come from discovering a broken database connection or an unissued certificate after the switch, not from DNS itself.
Can I redesign without changing URLs?
Yes, and it is the lowest-risk path available. As long as URL structure, titles and main content stay put, a visual refresh is a low-risk change. Restructure URLs as a separate phase once the new layout's numbers have settled.
Next step
If you are sitting on a site you are not sure can be moved safely, start with a free migration risk assessment. We crawl the existing site and hand back a URL inventory, a risk rating and an hour estimate. No pitch attached.
- Email: [email protected]
- Phone: 0916-224-047
- LINE: @ufv9089p