Moving to a new link page without losing traffic
Changing link pages is less about the new page than about the old address, which lives in places you no longer control. Done in the right order, the move costs you very little.
What actually breaks
The links are the easy part — you can rebuild those in an afternoon. The difficult part is the address. Your current one sits in profile bios, gets spoken aloud in videos, and appears in other people’s posts, press mentions and possibly on packaging. You control the bios. You do not control most of the rest.
So a migration is not a switch you flip. It is a period during which two addresses both lead somewhere useful, and traffic gradually shifts from the old one to the new one. Plan for that period rather than trying to avoid it.
None of this is an argument against the service you are leaving. Linktree is the category leader because it solved this problem early and solved it well, and a page that has been collecting visits for two years is a genuine asset. Treat the move as a relocation rather than a demolition and you keep most of what that asset is worth.
The order of operations
- Build the new page in full, with every link you actually use, before you tell anyone it exists.
- Open it on a phone, on cellular data, and tap every link to confirm each one lands where you expect.
- Export or screenshot the statistics from the old service while you still have an account there.
- Change the link on your highest-traffic profile first, then watch it for a day. If something is wrong you find out quickly, and on one profile only.
- Move the remaining profiles over the following days, one at a time, so any problem stays traceable.
- Replace the contents of the old page with a single link to the new address and one line of text explaining the move.
- Leave the old page alive. Delete it only once it has stopped sending you visitors, which takes months rather than weeks.
The last two steps are the ones people skip, and they are the cheapest insurance in the process. A deleted page shows a visitor an error. A page with one line of text and one link gives them somewhere to go.
The places people forget
- YouTube channel links, both the ones under the banner and the ones in old video descriptions.
- Your email signature, and any autoresponder that quotes it.
- Twitch panels, stream overlays and chat commands.
- The pinned post that has been sitting at the top of your profile since last year.
- Printed material: business cards, flyers, stickers, inserts in the orders you ship.
- A QR code on packaging, which cannot be edited once it is printed.
- Podcast show notes, which syndicate to every app carrying the feed.
- Links from collaborators and press pieces, which you can ask about but not change yourself.
A quick way to find the rest: search your old address as a phrase in a search engine, then search your own name alongside the old service’s name. Both turn up pages you had forgotten linked to you.
What moves with you, and what stays behind
The links move. An importer — ours works this way, and so do several others — takes the public address of your existing page, reads what is on it, and shows you the links it found so you can tick the ones worth keeping. It copies the visible page, nothing more, and saves an hour of retyping.
Statistics stay behind. Historical view counts belong to the service that recorded them, and no import brings them across. If the old service offers an export, run it. If it does not, screenshot the charts. Do this before you cancel anything, because access usually ends with the account.
Expect the new numbers to disagree with the old ones too. Services count visits differently, and a lower figure in the first week is often a different definition rather than lost traffic. Compare a full month against a full month.
A realistic timeline
One day to build the page and check it properly. About a week to move the profiles, one at a time, starting with the busiest. A month before the new address is the one people quote back to you. Six months to a year before the old one stops sending anyone at all — longer if it was ever printed, because paper keeps working for as long as it survives.
The traffic genuinely lost in a careful move is small, and most of it comes from places you could never have edited anyway. The traffic lost in a careless move comes from deleting the old page on the first day.