We shared some thoughts on LinkedIn recently about how a well-planned migration shouldn’t cost you any traffic or rankings. This post expands on that, because we keep seeing migrations go sideways three or four every year and end up being called in to help pick up the pieces. The hard truth is that most of these disasters were avoidable with better preparation upfront.
If you’re involved in a migration from an SEO perspective, this is one of the most consequential projects you’ll work on. Get it right and nobody notices which is exactly the point. Get it wrong and you’re looking at traffic drops, lost rankings, and months of recovery work. Here’s what to think through before you touch anything.
1. Define your goals
Why are you migrating in the first place? Are you after better performance, improved UX, stronger security, or expanded SEO capabilities? Maybe it’s a commercial decision, better pricing, access to different PSPs, new markets, or alternative game providers. Whatever the reason, get crystal clear on it before anything else. Your goals will shape every decision that follows, and without that clarity, it’s easy for different teams to pull in different directions mid-project.
2. Scope out what’s moving
Which pages and content are being migrated? Are you changing the domain or the URL structure? If the answer to either is yes, you need 301 redirects in place for every old URL, no exceptions. This is the most common point of failure we see. People underestimate how many URLs they actually have, miss a batch, and then wonder why chunks of their organic traffic have disappeared post-launch.
3. Content and metadata
Don’t leave optimised content behind. This is a bigger risk than most people realise. If pages are currently performing well, failing to transfer their content and metadata properly will tank your rankings fast. Title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, schema markup, all of it needs to move across accurately. If there’s room to improve the existing content, plan that work ahead of time and launch with the improved versions ready to go rather than trying to do it all after the fact.
4. Internal linking
Internal links don’t migrate themselves, and this is an area that often gets overlooked until it’s too late. Audit your existing link structure thoroughly and make sure it’s rebuilt accurately on the new site. A strong internal linking setup supports both user navigation and how search engines crawl and understand your site architecture, so letting it fall apart during a migration can quietly damage your SEO long after launch.
5. Sitemaps
Once the new site is live, submit your updated sitemap to search engines promptly. It speeds up indexing significantly and reduces the window where new pages go undiscovered or where search engines are still trying to make sense of the old structure. It’s a small step that makes a real difference, especially in the critical first few weeks post-migration.
6. Technical SEO
Before launch, run a full technical audit of the new site don’t wait until you’re live to find problems. Crawl errors, redirect chains, canonical tag issues, duplicate content, page speed, mobile usability work through all of it methodically. Technical issues that exist at launch tend to compound, and fixing them under pressure while traffic is dropping is far more stressful than catching them in staging.
7. Timeline
Map out each phase with realistic timeframes and build in buffer wherever you can. Identify what can be prepared well in advance so launch day isn’t carrying the full weight of the project. Rushed migrations are where things go wrong most often, teams cut corners, testing gets compressed, and redirects get missed. Give the project the time it actually needs.
8. Resources
Who’s responsible for what? What tools, platforms, and access levels will you need? Get alignment on this early and make sure there are no grey areas between teams. Migrations typically involve developers, designers, SEOs, and content teams all working in parallel, and unclear ownership is a fast track to things slipping through the cracks.
9. Risk assessment
Think through what could go wrong at each stage and have a clear plan for how you’d respond. The risks aren’t always technical; sometimes it’s a communication breakdown between teams, a missed redirect batch, or a staging environment that doesn’t accurately reflect what goes live. Document your risks, assign someone to own each one, and revisit the list as the project progresses.
10. Testing
Test the new site thoroughly before going live, and don’t treat this as a quick checkbox exercise. Check redirects one by one on a sample basis, test page rendering across devices and browsers, run your forms and user flows, and verify that tracking and analytics are firing correctly. If you can, get a second set of eyes involved — it’s easy to miss things you’ve been staring at for weeks.
11. Communication
Do your users need to know about the migration? In many cases the answer is no, and there’s no need to draw unnecessary attention to backend changes. But if login credentials, account processes, or anything user-facing is changing, you absolutely need to communicate that clearly and well in advance. Getting this wrong erodes user trust quickly, and it’s the kind of thing that generates support tickets and complaints at exactly the moment you’re already dealing with the stress of a live migration.
A few broader principles worth keeping front of mind throughout the whole process:
- Start planning earlier than feels necessary — the prep work always takes longer than expected
- Bring all relevant stakeholders in from the beginning — decisions made in silos create problems downstream
- Stay flexible — migrations rarely go 100% to plan, and the ability to adapt quickly matters
- Test everything, then test it again — there’s no such thing as over-testing before a major migration
Done well, a site migration should be invisible to your users and leave your search performance intact or better than before. Done poorly, it can undo months or years of SEO work in a matter of days. If you’re working on a site migration and want to make sure your iGaming SEO campaigns come out the other side intact, feel free to get in touch — we’ve seen enough migrations to know exactly where the danger zones are.
