What is the best way to migrate a site without losing positions?

Question

CMS

Hi all!
There is an active site with good search results, but an old design. We made a new site for its branch on a test site, but then decided to put it instead of the main one, abandoning the branch. Hence the question arose with the transfer of the site.
In terms of content, they are almost identical, but the essence of the problem is that the old site contains pages, i.e. path = site/article and new uses section and entries. The path for new articles is the same = website/article, but the url of the pages is in Russian. Naturally, the page address is also different.
What is the best way to transfer a site without losing positions in the search? Renaming links to English, as in the original, the customer also does not consider. CNC and all.
I suppose the best option is to transfer from the test ftp and database to the old site, and then redirect to all pages through a plugin or .htaccess?

Answer 1

In any case, positions will drop for a while, but then they will return to normal if there are no gross errors on the new site. If the test site is not indexed, then it is enough to transfer it to a working domain, and then specify 301 redirects in htaccess. Before replacing, make sure that all meta data is on the pages and is generated as it should, as well as the presence of h1 headers. Also check for the correctness of robots.txt so that the site is opened for indexing. If the test site is in the index, then as Vladimir Druzhaev wrote through the webmaster and the same actions.

Answer 2

What is the difficulty? Search engines all support this mechanism. Transfer and set the main mirror in PS webmasters. Nothing has changed in 2018 - articles from 5 years ago are still relevant. In terms of positions - it will sag, then it will return to normal. You can't replace a tooth without feeling pain. But then it will be like new.