How to move a site to new hosting without downtime or losing rankings
A migration looks like a technical detail right up until the site is down for half a day, email has stopped working, and the search engine has had time to record the outage. The order of operations matters — most problems come from switching DNS too early.
Preparation
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A full backup: files, database, server configuration, certificates.
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A list of what lives on the current hosting besides the site: email, subdomains, cron jobs, third-party scripts.
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Lower the TTL on the DNS records in advance — a day or two before the move. Then the switch propagates in minutes rather than hours.
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Record the current figures: speed, positions, number of indexed pages. Without that you can't later prove whether anything got worse.
The right order
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Deploy the site on the new server without touching DNS.
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Test it by IP or on a temporary domain: pages, forms, admin panel, file uploads.
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Set up the SSL certificate in advance — otherwise the first visitors after the switch see a browser warning.
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Re-sync the database immediately before switching, so enquiries received during preparation aren't lost.
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Switch the DNS.
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Don't shut the old server down for a few more days — some users and crawlers will keep arriving there while DNS caches update.
What to check straight afterwards
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Status codes on the main pages — 200, not 500 and not a redirect loop.
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That forms work: an enquiry must reach both the mailbox and the CRM.
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robots.txt — did a staging version with
Disallow: /travel across with the site. -
That sitemap.xml is served and reachable by crawlers.
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Email — it's what most often breaks during a hosting change, because the MX records get forgotten.
About rankings
Moving to a different server doesn't affect positions in itself, provided the page URLs didn't change and the site stayed reachable. Problems arise when the migration also changes the URL structure, loses some pages, or leaves the site down for hours. Those three things are what to control.
If a migration is coming up and you'd rather not gamble, we can run it with preparation and verification against this list.