An Arabic website migration is any big change to how a website is built or addressed: a redesign, a new platform, a new URL structure or a new domain. A badly planned migration can remove Arabic pages from Google and cut organic traffic for months, while a well-planned one usually causes only a temporary change in rankings. Bilingual websites carry extra risk, because the Arabic URLs, the hreflang tags and the right-to-left templates all have to survive the move. This guide gives a step-by-step plan to migrate an Arabic and English website without losing SEO rankings.
Types of Website Migration
| Type | Example | SEO risk |
|---|---|---|
| Redesign | New design and templates on the same URLs | Low to medium |
| Platform change | Moving from one content management system or e-commerce platform to another (see our guide to Arabic SEO by platform) | Medium to high, because URLs and templates often change |
| URL structure change | Moving Arabic pages from /ar-sa/ to /ar/, or from Arabic-script slugs to Latin slugs | High |
| Domain change | Moving a country domain into a subfolder of a global domain | High |
| HTTP to HTTPS | Adding HTTPS to the same domain | Lower |
| Language changes | Adding an Arabic version, or merging separate Arabic and English websites | Medium to high |
Why Arabic Website Migrations Carry Extra Risk
- Twice the URLs. Every Arabic page needs its own redirect and an updated hreflang pair.
- Arabic-script URLs. They appear in percent-encoded form in server logs, crawlers and redirect files, so each redirect has to match the exact form the old URL used.
- Right-to-left templates. A new theme can break the Arabic layout, especially on mobile.
- Content export. Arabic text, title tags, meta descriptions and alt text can be lost or show broken characters when content moves between systems.
- New redirect rules. Some platforms add automatic redirects by location or browser language, which Google recommends against, as our guide to bilingual SEO explains.
Before the Migration
- Record a benchmark. Export rankings, organic traffic and conversions by country and language, and crawl the old website.
- List every URL. Combine the crawl with Search Console, analytics and a backlink tool, so no page with traffic or backlinks is missed.
- Map old URLs to new URLs, one to one, for the Arabic and the English versions. Send each old page to its closest new equivalent, not to the homepage.
- Plan the redirects. Google recommends server-side permanent redirects, such as 301 or 308, that go straight to the final URL.
- Prepare the new hreflang tags, canonical tags and XML sitemaps with the new URLs.
- Check that Arabic content, title tags, meta descriptions, alt text and structured data move with each page.
- Build and test everything on a staging website that search engines cannot index.
- Choose the date carefully, away from Ramadan, White Friday and your other sales peaks, as our MENA marketing calendar shows.
Launch Day Checklist
- Turn on the redirects and test a sample of Arabic and English URLs, including Arabic-script URLs.
- Remove every staging block: noindex tags, robots.txt rules and passwords.
- Check hreflang tags, canonical tags, and the
langanddirattributes on the new pages. - Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- For a domain change, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console for every verified version of the old domain.
- Update internal links so they point to the new URLs directly.
- Check that analytics and conversion tracking still work.
After the Migration
Google tells site owners to expect temporary fluctuation in rankings during a move. For a medium-sized website, it says it can take a few weeks or more for Google to start showing the new URLs, and longer for large websites. In the weeks after launch:
- Check Search Console every day for 404 errors, page indexing and traffic by country and language.
- Crawl the new website to find broken links, redirect chains and missing hreflang tags.
- Add redirects for any old URL that still gets traffic or has backlinks.
- Ask important external websites to update their links to your new URLs.
- Keep the redirects in place. Google advises keeping them for as long as possible, generally at least one year.
Move Everything at Once or in Stages?
For small and medium-sized websites, Google recommends moving all URLs at the same time. Large websites can move one section at a time, which makes problems easier to spot and fix. On a bilingual website, move the Arabic and English versions of each section together, so the hreflang pairs always point to live pages.
Common Arabic Migration Mistakes
- Redirecting all old Arabic pages to the Arabic homepage.
- Leaving the Arabic version out of the redirect map.
- Launching with noindex tags or robots.txt blocks left over from staging.
- Keeping hreflang tags that still point to the old URLs.
- Building redirect chains on top of redirects from earlier migrations.
- Rewriting Arabic titles and content at the same time as changing URLs, which makes any drop hard to explain.
- Removing the redirects after a few months.
Signs a Migration Has Gone Wrong
| Sign | Usual cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Arabic traffic drops while English traffic holds | Arabic URLs missing from the redirect map, or blocked | Add the missing redirects and remove the blocks |
| Many 404 errors in Search Console | Old URLs that were not mapped | Add permanent redirects to the closest new pages |
| The wrong language shows in search results | hreflang or canonical tag errors | Correct the tags on both language versions |
| New URLs not indexed after several weeks | Noindex tags, robots rules or sitemap problems | Check the pages with URL Inspection in Search Console |
If traffic has already dropped, a Middle East SEO audit finds the cause and lists the fixes in order.
Conclusion
An Arabic website migration keeps its rankings when every Arabic and English URL is mapped, redirected and checked, and when the hreflang tags move with the pages. GOTOMENA plans and checks migrations for global brands as part of our Arabic SEO services. To plan your migration, contact our team.