Moving your website to someone else

A website migration means moving your site away from whoever runs it now, without losing your pages, your photos or your place in Google. The files are the easy part. The risk is in the addresses: every page you rank for lives at a URL, and if that URL changes without a redirect, Google treats it as a new page with no history.

What does a website migration actually move?

Four separate things, and they can sit in four different places: your domain name at a registrar, your hosting on a server, your content (text, services, hours, photos, reviews), and your page addresses. A migration that moves the first three and forgets the fourth is the one that costs you traffic.

Not sure who holds your domain and hosting? Run the four checks on who owns your website first.

How much does a website migration service cost?

With us it is $299, once, and that same $299 also pays for the rebuilt site. Migration is not a separate line, because moving your existing content is how we build the site. Elsewhere, the published prices we could verify start at $499 for a move on its own and run past $2,500 for a rebuild. Most agencies publish no number at all.

All prices checked September 2026 on the pages linked above.

What do you have to send us?

Nothing. Your services, hours, photos, copy and reviews are already published on your site and your listings, so we take them from there. That is why this works at $299. No content questionnaire, because the content is already public.

Pulled automatically from your live site:

• Every page of text, including the pages you forgot were there.
• Services and descriptions, one page each where you already had one.
• Opening hours, cross-checked against your Google Business Profile.
• Photos and your logo, at full resolution, copied onto our servers rather than linked to your old host.
• Reviews from Google, Facebook and Yelp, quoted and linked to the source.
• Name, address and phone number, checked for consistency across all of them.
• Every old page address, from your sitemap.xml and a crawl of the site.

Your side takes about ten minutes: design approval, one DNS change or temporary registrar access, a Google Business Profile invite as Manager, and a note of anything the web has wrong. A price that changed, a service you dropped, an old phone number.

What are the steps, and who does what?

Ten steps. You are involved in three. Nothing is charged until step 2, and the site is live within 72 hours of that approval.

1. We rebuild your homepage first, free. It goes on a private link. Say no and we delete it. Your job: look at it.
2. You approve the design. The $299 is charged now and $69/month starts. Your job: one click.
3. We pull the rest of the site. Pages, services, hours, photos, reviews and the full list of old addresses.
4. We rebuild every page on our servers at a temporary address. Your current site stays live and untouched.
5. You review it there. One round of changes is included. Your job: about 20 minutes.
6. We build the redirect map. Every old address matched to its new one, by hand, not in bulk to the homepage.
7. We copy your other DNS records first. MX, SPF, DKIM and TXT are recreated exactly before anything changes, so your email keeps working. This is the step that gets skipped, and the one that takes a business offline.
8. We lower your DNS TTL to 300 seconds, 24 hours before the switch.
9. We change one record. The A record now points at the new site. Your old host stays live for 30 days.
10. We watch for 30 days. Broken links, missing redirects, crawl errors.

What happens to my old page addresses?

Each one gets a 301 redirect to its closest match on the new site, and we keep those redirects permanently. Google's own site-move guidance says to "keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year". A typical map looks like this.

Note row three. Addresses that already work keep working. The cheap version of this job sends every old address to the homepage, and Google names that exact shortcut as a mistake: "Don't redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page of the new site. This can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404 error."

Audit this on any site, ours included. Get your old addresses from yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or Search Console, then test one.

# Should print "HTTP/2 301" and a location: line pointing at the new page.
curl -sI https://yourdomain.com/about-us.html | head -n 5

# Old address -> new address. Copy this into a sheet and fill it in
# before anyone touches your DNS. One row per page that has ever ranked.
#
# old                            new          status
# /index.php                     /            301
# /about-us.html                 /about       301
# /contact-us.php?id=2           /contact     301

A 302 means the move is treated as temporary and ranking signals do not carry across. A 404 means the page is gone, and so is its traffic. More on that in redesigning without losing rankings.

How much downtime is there?

Zero seconds of planned downtime. The new site is finished, tested and serving before a single DNS record changes, so there is never a moment when nothing is live. The old site answers until the switch, and for 48 hours afterwards either server shows a working site.

The reason is the order: build first, switch DNS last. With the TTL at 300 seconds, most visitors follow the new record within five minutes. Some providers ignore TTLs, so nothing is cancelled at your old host for 30 days. Google says a small to medium site can "take a few weeks for most pages to move" in its index, and that fluctuating visibility in that window is normal. That is Google re-crawling, not your site being down.

What do you keep after the move?

Three things, for as long as you are a customer.

• An archived copy of your old site. HTML, images and PDFs, frozen on switch day. If someone asks in two years what the old wording said, it still exists.
• A 30-day broken-link watch. We re-check every address on the redirect map once a week for 30 days, plus Search Console crawl errors, and fix what breaks.
• The redirects, permanently. They cost nothing to keep and they protect you from links pointing at addresses you stopped using years ago.

You also keep the right to leave. A free static export is available the same day you ask, no fee. The domain, content, leads and Google Business Profile stay yours, and we are only ever Manager on that profile, never Owner. Month to month, 30 days' notice, set out on the monthly plan page.

When is moving to us the wrong call?

When your site does something we do not build. We build brochure sites for local service businesses, not online stores with a checkout, booking or scheduling systems, custom web apps, membership portals with logins, or multi-location franchise sites. If your site does any of those, moving to us would cost you a working feature. Hire a specialist instead.

Two more honest cases. If the site is good and only the hosting is slow, your host will move it free. And if you are happy with your developer and just want changes made, ask them first. Read how to hire a web designer before replacing someone who is doing the job.