Website Migration Services With a Redirect Map Built From Evidence

Most website migration services build the redirect map from the old site's menu, and the menu is the wrong list. It shows the 40 pages you link to today. Google remembers the 400 pages that ever earned a click, a link or a crawl, including the 2019 blog post a local newspaper still links to.

Those forgotten URLs are where migrations quietly lose traffic. The new site launches, every page in the menu redirects nicely, and three weeks later the long tail is a wall of 404 errors (the "page not found" response). Nobody broke anything on purpose. The map was just built from memory.

I build it from evidence instead. If you're planning a move, tell me about it in a short migration questionnaire. I reply with a plan and a fixed quote within one business day. No pressure either way.

Starting at $300 for a host-to-host move, or $2,500 for a domain change or replatform with a full SEO redirect map. Every move includes the transfer, DNS and SSL, Search Console updates, and a redirect map. The SEO tier adds 30 days of monitoring after launch.

What you get with BigRed's website migration services

Here's what's in every migration, scaled to the type of move:

• The move itself. Files, database, email routing checks and scheduled tasks, from one host to another. WordPress, static sites and most PHP sites on cPanel, Plesk, a VPS or managed hosting.
• DNS and SSL. DNS (the internet's address book that points your domain to a server) switched in a planned window, and an SSL certificate (the padlock that makes HTTPS work) live before the first visitor arrives.
• An evidence-built redirect map. A spreadsheet of every old URL worth keeping, its new home, and the reason it's on the list. Then the server rules that make it happen.
• Search Console updates. New property verified, sitemap submitted, and the Change of Address tool filed for every old domain variant on domain moves.
• A launch test. Every old URL on the map requested and checked for one clean hop to the right page, before and after DNS flips.
• 30 days of monitoring (SEO tier). Crawl errors, indexing, and search clicks watched on both the old and new sites, with fixes made as they show up.

How a migration works, from questionnaire to launch

1. You fill in the questionnaire. Current host, new host or platform, domain plans, and roughly how many pages.
2. I reply with a plan and a fixed quote. Typically within one business day.
3. Inventory and map. I pull the evidence (more on that below) and build the map. For a site under a few hundred URLs this typically takes three to five working days. Big sites, or ones with years of URL changes, take longer.
4. Staging and testing. The new site gets built or copied on a staging copy (a private test version), and the whole map is tested against it.
5. Launch day and follow-up. DNS switch, redirects live, Search Console filed, then monitoring. A host-to-host move with no URL changes is often a one-day job. Domain changes run on the SEO tier's 30-day watch.

My hour-by-hour migration checklist shows the exact launch-day order if you want to see it before you hire anyone.

Why I build the website migration SEO map from evidence

This is the part that decides whether traffic survives. Google's own site-move guide says it plainly: it's important to map your old site's URLs to the URLs for the new site. The guide suggests pulling old URLs from sitemaps, server logs, analytics and the Links report in Search Console. I use those and add two more sources.

The five places old URLs hide

Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months, so it can't see the page you retired in 2022 that still has links pointing at it. The Wayback Machine can. Its CDX API (a free way to list every URL it has archived for a domain) gives me that history in one request:

## Read-only: list every unique URL the Wayback Machine archived for a domain with a 200 OK status.
## Safe to run. Big domains can return thousands of lines, so save to a file.
curl -s "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=example.com/*&fl=original&collapse=urlkey&filter=statuscode:200" > wayback-urls.txt

Server logs answer a different question: what is Google still asking for right now?

## Read-only: rank the URLs that clients calling themselves Googlebot requested, most-hit first.
## Anyone can fake that user agent, so treat this as a lead list, not proof.
grep -i "googlebot" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn > googlebot-urls.txt

Then I merge the lists, strip duplicates, and give each URL one of three outcomes. It redirects to the closest matching new page. It returns a 410 (gone for good) if it was junk. Or it stays put because nothing changed. Redirecting everything to the homepage isn't on the list. The same Google guide warns that many old URLs pointed at one irrelevant page "might be treated as a soft 404 error" (Google counts the redirect as a missing page).

Rules, not a plugin with 900 rows

Where URLs follow a pattern, one regex (pattern-matching) rule beats hundreds of single lines. Specific rules go first, then the catch-all for the domain:

## Old-domain .htaccess (Apache 2.4 or LiteSpeed). Specific mapped pages first, then the rest.
## Could break: any rule above it that redirects the same URLs. Test every mapped URL before launch.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old-example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^services/roof-repair-quote/?$ https://www.new-example.com/roof-repair/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old-example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.new-example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Note the R=301. Leave the number out and Apache sends a temporary 302 instead, which is one of the most common migration mistakes I see. My plain-English guide to 301 and 302 redirects covers why that matters.

What changed in Google's site-move guidance in 2026

Google updated its site-move guidance on June 17, 2026 to cover domain variants. For a domain move, you now file the Change of Address request for all verified variants of the old domain, including www and non-www. Google's help page adds that you should verify all of them in Search Console, even the ones you don't actively use.

The same help page says the tool's effect lasts 180 days and asks you to keep the old domain registered for at least a year. The site-move guide asks for redirects to stay "generally at least 1 year." I keep yours in place longer than that, because links from other sites don't expire.

Who this is for (and who it isn't)

This is a good fit if you're:

• Changing your domain name or merging two sites into one
• Moving from Wix, Squarespace or an old custom build to WordPress (or the reverse)
• Restructuring URLs during a redesign
• Leaving a host that's slow, expensive or suspended you once too often
• Cleaning up after a move that already lost traffic

I work with contractors, clinics, law firms, local retailers and SaaS startups across the US and Canada. Everything happens remotely, by video call, email and shared docs.

It isn't for you if you're moving hosts, keeping the same domain and the same URLs, and your new host offers a free migration. Plenty do, and for a simple WordPress site that's often enough. Ask them to lower the DNS TTL (how long the internet caches your DNS records) a week ahead, as Google suggests for moves without URL changes, and check your forms and email afterward. If you're redesigning without changing hosts, start with my guide to keeping your rankings through a redesign.

Website migration pricing: $300 or $2,500

Migration quotes vary wildly because "migration" covers very different jobs. Tenet's cost breakdown puts a basic transfer at $0 to $500 and domain or URL migrations at $3,000 to $20,000. Here's mine, as of October 2026:

If the inventory turns up something unexpected, like 5,000 old URLs or a second site nobody mentioned, I tell you before doing extra work, and you decide. Prices are in USD. Canadian clients can pay in CAD at the day's exchange rate. Everything else is on the pricing page.

Why hand your migration to me

I've spent 20+ years in search marketing, with a lot of that time spent inside servers: whole-site migrations between hosts, cPanel/WHM, Plesk, Cloudflare and Linux setups, and a great many .htaccess and regex redirects. Most migrations fail at the seam between server work and SEO work. I do both, so nothing falls into the gap.

Small details cause big outages. One example: if the old site runs Wordfence's firewall in Extended Protection mode, Wordfence's own support team says to remove it before moving to a new server, or the copied site may fail to load. Another: a plain find-and-replace on a WordPress database corrupts serialized data (settings stored in a format that records each value's length), which is why I use WP-CLI's search-replace, which handles it properly.

You also deal with one person the whole way. No handoffs between a "dev team" and an "SEO team."

Website migration FAQ

How much do website migration services cost?

At BigRed, a host-to-host move starts at $300 and a domain change or replatform with a full SEO redirect map starts at $2,500. Across the market, simple transfers run from free (many hosts include them) to about $500, while domain and URL migrations often cost $3,000 or more. The price difference comes from the redirect map and the monitoring, not from copying files.

Will I lose rankings when I migrate my website?

Some movement is normal. Google's site-move guide says to expect temporary fluctuation, and that a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more for the new URLs to show. A lasting drop usually comes from missing redirects, temporary 302s, redirect chains, or new pages that lost content. A careful map and launch test prevent most of that, though nobody can promise zero movement.

How long should I keep redirects after a migration?

Google asks for at least one year, and the Change of Address tool asks you to keep the old domain registered for at least a year. My advice is to keep them indefinitely. They cost almost nothing to leave in place, and other websites keep linking to old URLs for years. Removing redirects early throws away those links.

Do I need the Change of Address tool for every migration?

No. You need it only when the domain or subdomain changes. Moving hosts, switching to HTTPS, or changing URL paths on the same domain doesn't use it. For a domain move, Google now asks you to submit it for every verified variant of the old domain, including www and non-www, so verify all of them in Search Console first.

Can you migrate a site from Wix or Squarespace to WordPress?

Yes. Those platforms don't let you export everything cleanly, so content moves partly by hand, and the redirect map matters even more because their URL formats differ from WordPress. That job falls under the replatform tier, starting at $2,500, because the full map and the 30 days of monitoring are where the risk lives.

Next step

If you're planning a move, or one already went sideways, send me the details through the migration questionnaire. You'll get a plan and a fixed quote, and the map gets built from what Google actually remembers about your site.