REPLATFORM WITHOUT THE CRATER
Site Migration
Migrations are where years of SEO investment most often disappear in a single weekend. The damage is rarely one dramatic mistake — it is fifty small omissions that compound: redirects mapped by pattern rather than page, canonical tags carried over wrong, staging noindex shipped to production.
The work is unglamorous and almost entirely front-loaded. Everything that protects a migration happens before launch.
The work
What this actually involves.
Pre-migration baseline
A complete record of current URLs, rankings, traffic, backlinks and index status. Without this you cannot prove what was lost, let alone recover it.
Redirect mapping
Page-by-page mapping of every URL with equity attached, reviewed manually. Pattern-based rules handle the bulk; the pages that matter get checked individually.
Pre-launch QA
Staging environment audited against the same standard as production — redirects, canonicals, robots directives, structured data, internal links, and confirmation that the staging noindex is not about to ship.
Launch monitoring
Close monitoring through the launch window, with crawl, index and error tracking daily so problems are caught in hours rather than at the end of the month.
Post-migration recovery
Ranking and traffic tracked against the baseline for a full recovery period, with a remediation plan for anything that did not come back.
What you get
Deliverables
Scoped per engagement. This is the standard set — the specifics get agreed against what your baseline turns up.
- Pre-migration performance and index baseline
- Complete redirect map with manual review of high-value URLs
- Staging environment audit and sign-off checklist
- Launch-window monitoring with daily crawl and error reporting
- Post-launch recovery tracking against baseline
- Remediation plan for anything that does not recover
Questions
Site Migration FAQ
01When should we bring you in?
Before the new site is built, ideally. Once URL structure and rendering approach are locked, the cheap decisions have already been made — and some of them will be expensive to reverse.
02Will we lose traffic?
Expect a temporary dip through reprocessing even on a clean migration. What a good migration prevents is the permanent loss. Anyone promising zero impact is guessing.
03Can you help after a migration has already gone wrong?
Yes, and it is a common way people find us. Recovery is harder than prevention but usually possible — the first job is establishing what the old URL set was and what happened to it.
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