Before the DNS change
Crawl the old site and save the URL list. This is your ground truth for what must still resolve afterwards.
Check that every canonical tag in the export points at the destination domain, not at the framer.website URL. An export captures whatever was in the published HTML.
Confirm the robots file allows crawling. Staging deploys frequently ship a blanket disallow, and copying that to production is the single most damaging mistake on this list.
Confirm the sitemap lists the destination domain's URLs and is reachable at its usual path.
grep -rhoE '<link rel="canonical" href="[^"]*"' . \
| sed 's/.*href="//; s/"//' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -rnThe redirect map
If any URL changes shape — and it usually does, because exports write about.html where the builder served /about — you need a redirect for the old form.
Redirect once, with a 301, straight to the final URL. A chain of two or three hops dilutes the signal and slows the crawl.
Never redirect everything to the homepage. A mass redirect to root is treated as a soft 404 and loses the page's history entirely.
After the DNS change
Verify the new property in Search Console and submit the sitemap the same day. Do not wait for it to be discovered.
Watch the coverage report for a week. New 404s appearing in volume mean a path shape you missed.
Check that the apex and www resolve to one canonical host, with the other redirecting. Serving both is a duplicate-content split you control entirely.
Re-run a crawl and diff the URL list against the one you saved. Anything present before and missing now is either a deliberate removal or a bug.
Things that look broken and are not
A ranking dip in the first two weeks is normal while the new host is re-crawled. A dip that is still deepening after a month is not.
Impressions moving before clicks is expected — position recovers ahead of click-through as the snippet settles.
Questions
›Will moving hosts hurt my rankings?
Moving hosts on the same domain is close to invisible to search engines when URLs and content stay the same. What hurts is URL shape changes without redirects, a stray robots disallow, or slower response times on the new host.
›Do I need to tell Google I moved?
Only if the domain changed — that is what the Change of Address tool is for. A host change on the same domain needs no notification.
›How long until traffic recovers?
For a clean same-domain host move, there is usually nothing to recover from. For a domain change, expect weeks rather than days, assuming redirects are one-hop and complete.