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A migration is the highest-risk day in SEO. Rankings built over years can be undone in an afternoon by a redirect map nobody finished. We plan the move properly, test it on staging, sit with you through launch, and monitor closely enough to catch a problem in hours rather than at the next quarterly review.
Migrations rarely fail because of a decision anyone consciously made. They fail because the redirect map was treated as a launch-week task, because the staging site was never crawled, because nobody noticed the new template dropped the canonical tags, or because the whole thing shipped on a Friday with no one available on Saturday.
The pattern is consistent: the design and development work gets months of attention, and the SEO transfer gets whatever is left in the final fortnight. By the time rankings visibly drop, the cause is three weeks in the past and the recovery takes longer than the migration did.
The migration piece of infrastructure work sits alongside our broader technical SEO; this page covers the full transition lifecycle from planning through post-launch recovery.
Some are routine and some can halve your organic traffic. Knowing which you are attempting determines how much planning it deserves – and how many of these are happening at once, because they frequently combine.
The redirect map is the single most important artefact in a migration. Every URL that ever earned a link or a ranking needs a destination that serves the same purpose – not the homepage, not a category page, and not a 404.
Three rules we do not break: redirect to the closest equivalent page rather than the homepage; never chain more than one hop; and decide deliberately which URLs should return 410 rather than redirecting everything by reflex.
Everything on the left happens before anyone touches DNS. Everything on the right starts within an hour of going live and continues for weeks.
Even a well-executed migration usually shows some movement while search engines re-crawl and re-evaluate. What matters is the shape of it: a shallow dip recovering within weeks is expected, a sustained decline means something is broken.
We watch daily for the first fortnight and weekly after that, against the benchmark taken before launch. The point is to catch a problem while the cause is still recent enough to identify.
Timings shift with project size, but the sequence does not. The work before launch is what determines whether the work after launch is monitoring or firefighting.
What is moving and why, what the new platform can and cannot do, who is building it, and what the launch date actually is. We would rather join a migration early and be quiet than join late and be alarmed.
A full crawl of the current site plus Search Console, analytics and backlink data. This produces the URL inventory and the benchmark – the two documents everything else depends on.
Decisions on URL structure, what gets consolidated, what gets retired, and where the risks sit. Written down and agreed with your developers before anyone builds templates.
Every old URL assigned a destination. This is the slow, unglamorous heart of the work and the thing most often rushed.
Redirect rules built, metadata carried across, internal links updated, sitemaps and robots prepared, schema and canonicals checked on staging.
We are available during the switch. Redirects verified live, robots checked first, sitemaps submitted, analytics and Search Console confirmed working.
Full re-crawl against the pre-launch inventory. Anything missing, broken or misdirected is found here rather than by a customer.
Daily then weekly checks on index coverage, rankings, traffic by segment and crawl errors, measured against the benchmark.
Once stable, the new site becomes the baseline for normal SEO work – and the improvements the migration made possible get exploited.
Years of content and links are the asset at risk. Protecting them costs a fraction of rebuilding them.
Some movement is normal. Good planning makes it shallow and brief instead of permanent.
Monitoring against a benchmark means a broken template surfaces immediately, while the cause is still obvious.
Fixing a botched migration afterwards routinely costs more than planning it would have, and takes months longer.
Migrations are usually done to improve something. Getting the SEO right is what lets that improvement show up in results.
Redirect maps and specifications rather than vague SEO requirements arriving in the final week.
Benchmarks, decisions and validation recorded – so if something does move, you can see exactly what and when.
The genuine benefit of a runbook is that nobody is improvising at midnight.
If the redirect map is not finished and the staging site has not been crawled, launching on schedule is not a win – it is a decision to spend the next three months in recovery. We would rather have that conversation before the migration than after.
You get the URL inventory, redirect map, benchmark and launch-day sequence as real deliverables – documents your team can audit and reuse.
Redirect rules and specifications written for the platform you are actually moving to, with acceptance criteria they can test against.
The value is in the eight weeks before launch. We will still help after a bad migration, but prevention costs a fraction of recovery.
Without a pre-launch baseline, nobody can tell whether a dip is the migration, seasonality or an algorithm update. We take one first.
Someone who knows your redirect map is reachable during the switch and the days after, when the expensive mistakes happen.
Any migration can move rankings, and anyone guaranteeing none is guessing. We commit to the planning, the monitoring and a fast response.
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Tailored to your business goa
Reliable process, clear communication.
We're here when you need us.
Tailored to your business goa
Reliable process, clear communication.
We're here when you need us.
Tailored to your business goa
Reliable process, clear communication.
We're here when you need us.
We’d love to hear from you!
Everything businesses ask us before starting SEO migration.
The planning and technical work that preserves organic performance when a website changes – a new domain, platform, design or URL structure. It covers auditing what exists, mapping every old URL to a new one, transferring metadata and content, implementing redirects, and monitoring closely after launch to catch anything that broke.
Because rankings are attached to URLs, and a migration changes URLs. Every page that earned a link or a position has to point somewhere sensible, or that value evaporates. Migrations are the most common cause of sudden, large organic traffic losses we get called about.
Almost always, at least temporarily, while search engines re-crawl and re-evaluate. A well-planned migration typically shows a modest dip recovering over a few weeks. A poorly planned one can lose a substantial share of organic traffic and take months to recover, if it fully recovers.
Through the unglamorous parts: a complete URL inventory from crawl, analytics and Search Console combined; a one-to-one redirect map; metadata and content carried across deliberately; staging crawled and diffed before launch; then daily monitoring against a benchmark taken beforehand.
A 301 tells search engines a page has moved permanently and passes most of its ranking signals to the new URL. The strategy is deciding, for every old URL, what the right destination is – the closest equivalent page rather than the homepage, with no chains, and a deliberate choice about which URLs should return 410 instead.
Preparation is typically four to eight weeks before launch for a medium site, longer for large e-commerce or enterprise properties. Post-launch monitoring runs at least thirty days. The work scales with URL count and how many changes are happening simultaneously.
Yes – WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Webflow and custom builds among others. Platform moves are high risk because URL patterns usually change and platform defaults reintroduce issues like duplicate parameters or automatic canonical behaviour.
Yes, and they need the most care. Product URLs, variants, discontinued lines, category filters and faceted navigation all have to be handled deliberately. Discontinued products in particular need a decision – redirect to the category, to a replacement, or return 410 – rather than a blanket rule.
We verify redirects are live and behaving as tested, check robots.txt and noindex tags first because those are the catastrophic errors, submit the new sitemap, confirm analytics and Search Console are recording, then start daily monitoring of index coverage, rankings and errors.
Daily for the first two weeks, then weekly for at least a month, against the pre-launch benchmark. We track index coverage, rankings for target terms, organic traffic by page type rather than blended, crawl errors, 404s and Core Web Vitals – and we report what we are seeing plainly, including when it is slower to recover than we hoped.
Send us your site and what you are planning. We will map the risks specific to your migration, tell you what the timeline realistically allows, and show you what a proper runbook looks like. Free, no obligation, and the findings are yours either way.
The businesses that win aren’t just found – they’re found first. We make that happen, from local search to your entire digital presence.
