Website Migration Without Losing SEO: How We Moved proedetal.com to pro-ed.com
ProEd needed a new domain and a new platform before peak enrolment season. Here's how we moved 68 pages without giving up the rankings behind its enrolments.
Ashif Abbas
A website migration is one of the riskiest SEO projects a school or education provider can take on. Change your domain and your platform at once, and every URL Google knows about changes with it. ProEd needed both, just before peak enrolment season.
This post covers how we did it, what we'd tell any education provider planning the same, and the checklist we work from.
About ProEd
ProEd runs immersive, career-focused programmes for students aged 13 to 18 at Imperial College London, in fields such as medicine, engineering, computer science and law. Families from around the world find those programmes on Google, so losing search visibility would mean losing enrolments.
The challenge
ProEd was moving from proedetal.com to its new brand domain, pro-ed.com, and from WordPress to a custom-built site. That meant carrying over 68 pages and a full blog library, each with rankings, backlinks and internal links built up over years. And it had to go live before peak season, when a traffic dip would cost the most.
How we protected ProEd's rankings
- Benchmarked every page first. An SEO audit of proedetal.com recorded each page's rankings, traffic and backlinks, so we'd know what to protect and could spot any drop after launch.
- Mapped all 68 URLs one-to-one. Every old page got its closest new equivalent. Nothing was dumped on the homepage.
- Set up page-to-page 301 redirects. Permanent redirects tell Google each page has moved and pass its ranking signals to the new URL.
- Kept the blog. Old articles often hold more backlinks than any other page, so we built a new blog with full SEO fields and Article schema to give every existing post a home on pro-ed.com.
- Told Google about the move. We generated a new sitemap, submitted it and verified pro-ed.com in Google Search Console.
- Monitored after launch. We tracked crawl errors, indexing and rankings against the benchmark for 6 weeks after launch
The new site is also faster, and ProEd's team now publishes programme pages and blog posts themselves, so the site keeps growing without a developer in the loop.
Planning your own migration? Book a free migration audit and we'll map your risks before you move.
The outcome
- All 68 pages migrated and redirected to pro-ed.com.
- Organic traffic: 70% of organic clicks retained 6 weeks after launch
- Every existing blog post kept its URL equity on the new domain.
- Launched on 20 August 2026, ahead of peak enrolment season.
Website migration checklist for education providers
Use this whether you're changing domain, platform or both.
- Benchmark rankings, traffic and backlinks for every URL before you start.
- Crawl the old site to list every URL, including blog posts, PDFs and programme pages.
- Map each old URL to its closest new page, prioritising the pages that bring in enquiries.
- Set up page-to-page 301 redirects and test every one before launch.
- Keep page titles, meta descriptions and core content on your top pages unless you have a reason to change them.
- Submit a new XML sitemap and verify the new domain in Google Search Console.
- For a domain change, use Search Console's Change of Address tool.
- Monitor crawl errors, indexing and rankings for several months, and fix broken redirects quickly.
FAQs
Will changing my domain hurt my SEO?
It can, but it doesn't have to. Rankings usually drop when old URLs break or redirect to the wrong page. With a full audit, one-to-one 301 redirects, a new sitemap and Search Console updated, a domain change can keep most of the visibility you've built.
How long should 301 redirects stay in place?
Google advises keeping redirects for at least a year, and longer is safer. Backlinks, bookmarks and old emails keep pointing at your old URLs for years, so many sites keep them permanently.
How long does a website migration take?
It depends on the number of pages, the amount of content and the integrations involved. Allow time for the audit and URL mapping before build starts, and for testing before launch.
Migrate without losing what you've built
Whether you're a university programme, summer school or edtech platform, Lunova moves education websites to modern platforms while protecting the rankings you've earned. Book a free migration audit
Ready when you are