This case study documents a seven-month engagement with a Singapore executive search firm that rebranded under a new name and moved to a new domain, with a full website redesign at the same time. A domain change is the riskiest kind of website migration. Every URL changes, every backlink points to the old address, and Google has to transfer years of trust to a domain it has never seen. When a redesign happens in the same launch, page content, internal links and templates change too, which makes problems harder to trace.
The old site had been live for nine years. It brought in 3,460 organic visitors a month, ranked on page 1 for 218 keywords and generated about 42 employer enquiries a month from search. It also had more than a thousand job listing pages, many of them expired, plus 96 referring domains pointing to old URLs. The client's developer was building the new site on a new platform and planned to redirect everything to the new homepage. We were brought in two months before the planned launch date.
We crawled the old site and combined the crawl with 16 months of Search Console data and a backlink export to build a full list of 1,148 URLs that had traffic, rankings, links or internal links. We recorded the 218 page 1 keywords, the top 50 pages by traffic and links, and enquiries by landing page, so every change after launch could be measured against a fixed starting point.
Without a benchmark, nobody can tell whether a post-launch drop is normal or a problem. The URL list also showed what the old site was actually worth: a small number of specialist hiring pages and salary guides brought in most of the employer enquiries.
We mapped all 1,148 old URLs one to one to their closest page on the new site. Expired job listings were redirected to the matching job category rather than the homepage, and old salary guides to their updated versions. The full map went to the client's developer as a spreadsheet of 301 redirect rules, and we tested every rule on staging for single-hop 301s with no chains.
Redirecting everything to the homepage is one of the most common migration mistakes. Google treats most of those redirects as soft 404s, so the rankings and links of the old pages are lost. One-to-one mapping is what lets a new domain keep what the old one had earned.
We crawled the new site on a password-protected, noindexed staging server and compared it with the old site page by page. The first crawl found 37 pages missing their old copy, canonical tags pointing at the staging address, internal links hard-coded to the old domain and job pages with no structured data. The developer fixed these in two rounds and we re-crawled after each.
Problems are cheap to fix on staging and expensive after launch. With a redesign and a domain change landing on the same day, the staging crawl was the only point where the old and new sites could be compared calmly, one page at a time.
On launch day we worked through a fixed checklist: confirm the site could be indexed, test all 1,148 redirects, verify the new domain in Search Console, submit the change of address, submit the new XML sitemap, keep the old sitemap live for a few weeks so Google recrawled the redirects, and check that GA4 was recording enquiries. We also contacted the owners of the 40 strongest backlinks to ask them to update their links.
Search Console's change of address tool tells Google the move is permanent and speeds up the transfer of signals to the new domain. The checklist meant nothing depended on memory during a launch day when the developer, the client and SSA were all making changes.
We checked indexing, rankings, 404 errors and enquiries daily for the first two weeks and weekly after that. Traffic dipped 8% in week two and was back to the pre-migration level by day 19. We found and redirected 26 old URLs that had been missed, mostly from old email campaigns. From month 4 we expanded the specialist hiring pages for finance and technology roles, which the new design made easier to build.
Some dip after a domain change is normal while Google processes the redirects. Watching closely meant the missed URLs were caught in days, not months. Once the move had settled, the new site's better structure let the firm grow past where the old site had been.
Every migration has close calls. These four would each have cost this firm months of traffic if they had not been caught.
The original plan sent all old URLs to the new homepage. Replacing it with a one-to-one map of 1,148 redirects kept 97% of page 1 keywords through the launch.
The new site went live with the staging setting that tells search engines not to index it. The launch checklist caught it within 40 minutes, before Google had recrawled the homepage.
Templates copied from staging pointed every canonical tag at the staging address. The staging crawl found this two weeks before launch.
The old domain was due for renewal three months after launch, with auto-renew switched off. If it had lapsed, every redirect would have stopped working. It is now renewed for five years.
Bring SEO in before the new site is built, not after it launches. If you are rebranding or redesigning in Singapore, the URL map, the benchmark and the staging checks have to happen while the developer can still change things. Most traffic losses after a migration come from decisions made months earlier.
A short dip after a domain change is normal. A long one is not. This site dipped 8% and recovered in 19 days because every old URL had a matching new page. Sites that redirect everything to the homepage often lose traffic for months and some never fully recover.
Keep the old domain and its redirects for years. The redirects are what carry your links and rankings to the new domain. Renew the old domain for several years and treat its expiry date as a business risk, not an admin task.
It can, but it does not have to. With one-to-one 301 redirects, Search Console's change of address tool and close monitoring, most sites see a small, short dip. This site dipped 8% and was back to its old traffic in 19 days.
A crawl and traffic benchmark of the old site, a one-to-one redirect map, a staging crawl to compare old and new pages, a launch-day check of indexing, redirects, sitemaps and tracking, a change of address in Search Console for domain moves, and daily monitoring for the first two weeks.
Keep them for at least a year, and ideally for as long as you own the old domain. Backlinks and bookmarks keep pointing to old URLs for years, and the redirects are what pass their value to the new site.
With a careful migration, a few weeks. Small dips of 5% to 15% that recover within a month are common. If traffic is still down after two to three months, check the redirects, indexing and any pages that were dropped in the redesign.
Start with a free SEO audit before your new site goes live. We benchmark your current traffic and rankings, list the URLs that carry your links and enquiries, and check your redirect plan, then show you exactly what needs to be in place on launch day.
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