A website move reaches beyond the new homepage. Customers may arrive through a saved product link, an old proposal or a search result. Your team may depend on the same domain for email. A considered move starts by understanding those connections and deciding what needs to keep working.
Identify what customers already use.
Collect the existing page addresses, important downloads, forms and external connections. Ask the team which pages they send to customers and which steps support everyday work. This adds business context to the technical inventory and helps decide what deserves particular attention.
If page addresses change, map each useful old address to its relevant new destination. Google recommends that mapping and permanent redirects for moved URLs. Sending every old product or service link to the homepage can leave someone searching for information they had already found.
Reading behind this section: Google Search Central
Test the new destination before the switch.
Review the new site at a separate development address. Follow the main journeys on a phone as well as a larger screen. Check the relevant contact, booking or buying steps, including what the team receives and where the information is saved.
Martin Fowler describes preparing and testing a separate environment before directing visitors to it. The useful principle for an owner is preparation: identify the version being approved, the person making the switch and the checks that establish whether it worked.
Reading behind this section: Martin Fowler
Decide how to recover before changing anything.
Record the existing hosting and DNS settings, preserve the necessary content and agree a rollback route. A rollback means returning to a known working arrangement. Its details depend on the platform and on what changes during the move.
Orders, enquiries and edits created after the switch need particular care. Returning to an earlier website version may not restore those records. The plan should explain how new activity is preserved and reconciled if recovery becomes necessary.
Reading behind this section: Martin Fowler
Keep checking once the address is live.
Check redirects, important pages, email and the enquiry journey at the production domain. Confirm that intended public pages can be crawled and that development restrictions have been reviewed. Monitor both old and new addresses where the move involves URL changes.
Google advises monitoring during a site move and explains that search visibility can fluctuate while changes are processed. Agree who reviews those observations and handles problems. A successful deployment is one useful checkpoint; the customer journey still needs to be verified.
Reading behind this section: Google Search Central
Put it to use
A useful check for your business.
- List important pages, downloads and connected services.
- Review the new site and record approval.
- Agree the switch, rollback and handling of new records.
- Verify customer journeys at the live address.
The thinking behind this guide
Sources & further reading.
Our practical interpretation, with the references below for the specific principles and further detail.
- Site moves with URL changes
Inventory, relevant URL mapping, permanent redirects and monitoring during a move; search can fluctuate.
- Blue Green Deployment
Separate tested environments, a planned switch and rollback considerations when transactions or database changes are involved.
