Moving Your Website Domain? Why Migrations Drag On for Months

One site lost 5,000 daily impressions four months after a domain move. Here is the checklist that helps your own website migration finish cleanly.

A site owner moved to a new domain at the start of 2026. Traffic recovered by early April, and everything looked fine. Then, about four months in, Google switched visibility back to the old domain. According to Search Engine Journal's report on the Reddit thread, the new domain dropped from roughly 5,000 impressions a day to about 20 a week, and more than 5,000 pages slipped into "Crawled, Not Currently Indexed".

Google's John Mueller replied that "sometimes things just take a particularly long time to be fully processed" and offered to look at the domains. That is not a comforting answer if you are planning a rebrand or a redesign this quarter. The good news is that most long, painful migrations trace back to a short list of fixable mistakes. Here is how to avoid them.

What actually happened, and what we don't know

Be careful with this story. Google has not confirmed why that particular migration stalled, and the site owner's thread does not say whether the problem was ever resolved. The causes below come from the Search Engine Journal analysis, not from a Google diagnosis.

Still, the list is useful because it matches what we see on real projects. The suspected culprits were:

• Hardcoded absolute URLs in navigation, footers or content that still point to the old domain.
• Registrar-level forwarding that may not keep the URL path, so deep pages all land on the homepage.
• HTTPS forwarding that fails because the old domain has no valid SSL certificate.
• Redirect chains, where one old URL hops through several others before reaching the new page.
• An XML sitemap that still lists the old domain, which sends Google conflicting signals about which version is canonical.

Step 1: Crawl the old site before you touch anything

Run a full crawl of the current site with a tool like Screaming Frog and export every URL, plus every internal link that uses a full absolute address. Those absolute links are the ones that quietly keep pointing at the old domain after launch.

This crawl becomes your redirect map. If you are also changing page structure during a redesign, decide now which old URL maps to which new one. A website redesign without a redirect map is the most common way we see rankings disappear.

Step 2: Build one-to-one, server-side redirects

Google's site move documentation is clear on the basics. Use server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308) from each old URL to its matching new URL. Send each old URL straight to its final destination, and keep any unavoidable chain short.

Two mistakes to avoid. First, don't point lots of unrelated old URLs at the new homepage. Second, don't rely on a registrar's "domain forwarding" setting unless you have tested that it preserves paths. Test a dozen deep URLs by hand and check the response codes.

Step 3: Fix the old domain's HTTPS

If visitors or Googlebot request an old HTTPS URL and the old domain has no valid certificate, the redirect never fires. Keep the certificate on the old domain active for as long as the redirects run. This is cheap to do and easy to forget once the old hosting contract ends.

Step 4: Switch the sitemap and the canonicals

Submit a sitemap of the new URLs in Search Console, then retire the old one. Check that every page's canonical tag points to the new domain, and that your internal links, hreflang tags and structured data do too. A leftover old-domain reference is a small thing, but it is a vote for the wrong site.

This is also a good moment for a technical clean-up. Our technical SEO work usually starts with exactly this kind of audit: canonicals, redirects, sitemaps and crawl paths.

Step 5: Use the Change of Address tool, for every version

Google says the Change of Address tool is only for domain or subdomain moves, not for HTTP-to-HTTPS switches, www changes or path changes inside one domain. For a domain move, submit it for the old site and cover all verified variants, including www and non-www.

The Search Engine Journal article notes that Mueller said this step helps the domain "fully migrate", and it points out that stalled moves may involve canonicalisation, for instance if external links point to either the www or non-www version of the old site. Cover both.

Step 6: Be patient, and keep the redirects

Google says that for a medium-sized site, "it can take a few weeks or more" for the new URLs to appear, and larger sites take longer. Temporary ranking swings are normal. Googlebot also has to visit every old and new URL at least once before the move counts as complete.

Google also advises keeping redirects "for as long as possible", generally at least a year. Put a calendar reminder in for that date. Don't let anyone remove them early to save a few lines of server config.

For small and medium sites, Google recommends moving all URLs at the same time rather than section by section. Larger sites can move in stages, ideally starting with a section that rarely changes so you can watch the effect.

What to watch after launch

Check these weekly for at least the first three months:

1. Search Console indexing report: look for a growing "Crawled, Not Currently Indexed" count on the new domain.
2. Performance report: impressions should shift from the old property to the new one. If they swing back, investigate canonicals first.
3. Crawl of the old domain: every URL should return a single 301 or 308 to the right page.
4. Analytics: compare organic landing-page sessions to the pre-move baseline, and make sure your analytics setup tracks the new domain correctly.

Key takeaways

• Long migrations are usually caused by fixable issues: absolute links, weak forwarding, missing certificates, chains and old sitemaps.
• Crawl first, map every URL one to one, and test redirects by hand before launch.
• Use the Change of Address tool for all site versions, and only for real domain moves.
• Keep redirects and the old SSL certificate running for at least a year.
• Treat a stalled move as a canonicalisation problem until proven otherwise.

If a domain change or redesign is on your roadmap, we can plan the redirects, sitemaps and monitoring with you before launch day. You can get a free quote and we will tell you what the migration should involve.

Sources

• Google Says Why Site Migrations Can Exceed 4 Months (Search Engine Journal)
• Site move with URL changes (Google Search Central)