Technical Site Migration
& Domain Change Playbooks

A site migration is one of the highest-risk operations in web infrastructure. A single misconfigured redirect, a premature DNS flip, or an overlooked canonical tag can wipe out years of accumulated search equity in 72 hours. These playbooks exist to prevent that.

Each guide is written for practitioners — not theorists. Every section contains exact server configs, CLI commands, validation checklists, and rollback protocols you can execute the same day. Whether you are consolidating domains, replatforming a CMS, or restructuring a URL taxonomy, the sequence below will get you through it without surprises.

Start with the auditing playbook to capture your baseline, work through URL mapping to lock in your redirect architecture, then execute the DNS cutover with a tested zero-downtime plan. Every phase links to the next so nothing falls through the cracks.

The library now runs to 88 guides across five sections, covering the whole sequence from a frozen crawl baseline through to the seventy-two-hour soak window after the switch — including the parts that are easy to leave until too late: TLS certificates that must be valid before anything resolves to the new origin, alternate-language annotations that break the moment a hostname changes, and the conversion failures that return a clean 200 while quietly losing money.

This release goes deeper into the handover itself. Search Console ownership is a claim backed by a live token rather than a setting you edit, so a cutover can quietly unverify the property you are about to file a Change of Address from; the sitemap you delete on launch day is the fastest route a crawler has to your redirects; and a rollback is a surgical revert of one rule segment, not an undo of the whole deployment. Each of those now has its own step-by-step guide with the commands to prove the result.

Recently added

New in this release — the steps most often discovered late, when they are expensive:

Deep dives across the whole sequence

Where the newest guides sit in the migration timeline: