SEO Migrations in Burgos — Change your website without losing your Google ranking

Web migrations fall into four main categories. Domain migrations involve changing your company's main URL. CMS migrations happen when you change the technology platform: from PrestaShop to Shopify, from Joomla to WordPress. Design or redesign migrations affect URL structure when content is reorganised. And HTTP to HTTPS migrations, while simpler, still require supervision to ensure Google correctly transfers authority to the new protocol. Each type has its own risks and a different action protocol.

Any change that modifies your website's URLs requires professional SEO supervision, without exception. If old URLs cease to exist without proper 301 redirects, Google loses track of your indexed pages, does not transfer accumulated authority and traffic drops sharply. In practice, SEO support is mandatory when: changing domain, migrating platform, doing a redesign that affects URL structure, activating HTTPS, or restructuring categories in an e-commerce. Acting after the fact to recover positions is always more costly than preventing the problem from the start.

Industry data is compelling: 60% of web migrations without SEO supervision result in organic traffic losses of more than 30%. In severe cases, especially domain changes without redirects, the drop can exceed 80% of traffic and take more than a year to recover, if it recovers at all. For a business in Burgos that depends on Google visibility to generate leads, a poorly executed migration can mean months without organic visits and direct financial losses.

A website can lose most of its organic traffic in less than 48 hours after a poorly managed migration. The mechanism is simple: if old URLs cease to exist without 301 redirects, Google finds 404 errors on all its indexed pages. As it cannot resolve those URLs, it will progressively deindex them and lose the ranking reference it had. For a business in Burgos with 5 or more years of SEO work, this is equivalent to instantly losing all the accumulated investment in organic visibility.

The most frequent errors we see in unsupervised migrations are: complete absence of 301 redirects, chain redirects that reduce authority transfer, change of URL architecture without prior mapping, loss of SEO content in pages when migrating between platforms, and failure to notify Google in Search Console of the domain change. Another common error is migrating during peak business season, when a traffic drop has an immediate financial impact.

After a poorly executed migration, the typical scenario includes: hundreds of 404 errors in Google Search Console, chain redirects that transfer only 90% of authority per hop, duplicate pages due to misconfigured canonicals, and loss of backlinks pointing to old URLs. Each external link pointing to your website has a specific SEO value. Without a correct 301 redirect to the new equivalent URL, that value is permanently lost.

Before any changes, we need an exact snapshot of the current SEO state of your website. The pre-migration audit analyses: the complete inventory of indexed URLs with SEO value, pages that generate traffic and how much, the backlink profile and which URLs they point to, metadata and On-Page structure of main pages, and current technical errors worth correcting during the process. This diagnosis is the reference document against which we verify that nothing was lost once the migration is complete.

The redirect map is the heart of any SEO migration. Starting from the complete inventory of current URLs, we establish the exact correspondence between each old URL and its equivalent on the new website. This process includes identifying URLs to merge, pages to eliminate with redirection to the most relevant content, and new URLs with no prior equivalent.

The day of the new website launch is the highest-risk moment of the entire migration. We carry out real-time supervision verifying: that redirects are active and working correctly, that key pages are accessible without errors, that the robots.txt file does not accidentally block crawling, that the XML sitemap points to the new URLs, and that canonicals are correctly configured. Any problem detected in the first hours can be corrected before Google records it as a permanent error.

The first 30–60 days after a migration are critical for SEO. We monitor weekly: the indexation status in Google Search Console, the evolution of positions for main keywords, organic traffic compared to the equivalent previous period, new 404 errors that may appear, and the re-indexation speed of new URLs. Any detected anomaly is corrected within 24–48 hours. With this monitoring, position recovery occurs in weeks, not months.

A domain change is the highest-risk migration from an SEO perspective because it requires Google to learn that the authority of an old domain transfers to a new one. The process requires: 301 redirects from 100% of old domain URLs, formal notification of the change in Google Search Console using the change of address tool, and intensive monitoring for the first 90 days. Correct management allows recovery of most traffic within 4–8 weeks.

Changing technology platform is one of the most frequent and also most risky migrations. Each CMS has its own URL conventions, so migration almost always implies changes to the URL structure. The additional challenge is that SEO data does not automatically export to the new CMS: metadata, canonical tags, Schema Markup and indexation settings must all be manually reimplemented in the new platform from scratch.

Many companies opt for a complete redesign without realising they are also changing the URL structure. What from a design perspective is a user experience improvement, from an SEO perspective is a complete migration requiring its own redirect process and verification. In Burgos we have seen several cases of visually successful redesigns that destroyed years of organic ranking by not correctly managing redirects.

Activating HTTPS is the technically simplest migration, but not without risks. The most common errors are: not consistently redirecting the HTTP version to HTTPS, generating mixed content that blocks website display, and not updating internal links to the new HTTPS URLs. Google has considered HTTPS a ranking factor for years, making this migration mandatory for any website seeking organic visibility in 2026.

Restructuring your website architecture — changing the category hierarchy or reorganising content into new thematic silos — is also a form of SEO migration. The challenge is maintaining consistency between old URLs and the new structure, especially when there are pages with external backlinks pointing to URLs that will change. This type of migration, well executed, can result in a significant improvement in ranking by clarifying the thematic architecture for Google.

This phase begins 2 to 4 weeks before launch and is the most important of the entire process. Without rigorous planning, migration day becomes a firefighting exercise. The main deliverable is the complete redirect map, but it also includes verifying that the new website is technically ready: page speed, indexability, canonicals, metadata and Schema Markup correctly implemented.

A migration launch should never happen on a Friday or before public holidays. We supervise the process in real time: verifying redirects are active from the first minutes, reviewing server logs to detect crawl errors, checking accessibility of key pages and validating that Google starts crawling the new website correctly. Supervision continues for the first 24–48 hours until confirming normal operation.

In the 60 days after launch, most problems not visible on migration day will emerge. Google takes time to fully re-index a migrated website, and during that process unexpected errors may appear. We monitor weekly: indexation status, main keyword positions, organic traffic, new 404 errors and re-indexation speed. Detected problems are corrected within 24–48 hours to minimise their impact on ranking.

An accessories online store based in Burgos migrated from PrestaShop to Shopify after years of technical problems with their platform. The challenge was transferring more than 1,200 product and category URLs to Shopify's new structure. We managed the complete inventory, configured the redirects and reimplemented SEO metadata on the new platform. Result: 0% organic traffic loss in the first 30 days and improved page speed that led to position improvements in 60 days. [View full case →](/casos-reales)

A B2B services company in Burgos underwent a complete rebrand including a domain change. We planned the change 3 weeks in advance: inventory of 340 URLs, redirect map, verification of the new domain in Search Console and launch supervision. After 30 days, the new domain had recovered 95% of the old domain's organic traffic. [View full case →](/casos-reales)