How to migrate a venue website without losing traffic.

Start with a full URL inventory, not a page list

Before anything else, export every URL search engines already know about — from Google Search Console's Pages report, from your server logs, and from the existing XML sitemap.

This is not the same as a list of pages in your CMS. A venue site accumulates URLs no one remembers: old language variants, retired event archives, campaign landing pages, PDF seating charts.

Every one of them may be carrying inbound links from a promoter, a local news story, or a resident company's website.

Redirect retired URLs — never noindex them

This is the single most common and most expensive mistake.

When a URL no longer exists on the new site, the instinct is to mark it noindex so it stops appearing in search. That tells Google to delete the page and discard everything it had earned. A 301 redirect to the closest surviving page passes that value forward instead.

The rule: if a retired URL has any reasonable equivalent on the new site, redirect it. Reserve noindex for pages that should never have been indexed at all — internal search results, filtered calendar views, print variants.

Map event detail URLs before you change their shape

Event detail pages are the highest-traffic, shortest-lived URLs a venue has, and they are what promoters, ticketing partners and aggregators link to.

If your event URL pattern changes, every one of those links breaks at once.

If the pattern must change, generate redirects programmatically from the old slug to the new one rather than by hand — a venue with a decade of archives has thousands of these.

Protect the ticketing deep links

Verify that every ticketing handoff still resolves after launch: the buy links, presale codes, seat-map URLs and any partner-specific tracking parameters.

These usually live outside the CMS and are the most likely thing to be missed, because they work right up until the moment DNS changes.

Time the launch around the on-sale calendar, not the project plan

Never launch in the 48 hours before a major on-sale, and avoid the week of a season announcement.

The right window is a genuinely quiet stretch — and for most venues that is a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, not a Friday afternoon when nobody is around to watch it.

Keep the event archive

There is a strong instinct to drop past events during a migration to reduce content volume.

Historical event pages accumulate links and often rank for artist and tour queries long after the show. Keep them, and keep their URLs.

Watch the right things for 30 days after launch

Search Console's Pages report for a rise in “not indexed” reasons, Core Web Vitals for a mobile regression, and your ticketing referral numbers for a drop that indicates a broken handoff.

The first two weeks are when a redirect mistake is still cheap to fix.