Change your site without losing your search traffic

Where migrations go wrong

Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from a short list of mistakes.

• Old URLs that return errors instead of pointing to their new home.
• Redirects that all go to the home page, which Google tends to treat like a missing page.
• Content, titles or internal links stripped out in the redesign.
• A staging block or noindex tag left switched on at launch.
• No record of what traffic looked like before, so nobody can tell what was lost.

Each one is avoidable with planning.

Before launch: the baseline

We start by capturing where you stand today. That means a full crawl of the current site, organic sessions, enquiries and revenue by page from your own analytics, and the queries and positions each page holds in Search Console.

This baseline is the yardstick for everything after. It also tells us which pages carry the most value, so those get the closest attention.

Redirect mapping

Every URL that earns traffic, links or sales gets a one-to-one redirect to the closest matching new page. Not to a category, not to the home page, unless there really is no better match.

We build the map in a spreadsheet you can review, covering pages, products, categories, images and important files. Before launch we test it against the staging site, so we know each old address lands where it should.

Checks on the new site

Before the switch, we crawl staging and compare it with the old site. We look for:

• Titles, headings and body content that went missing.
• Internal links that still point at old URLs.
• Structured data, canonical tags and hreflang that need carrying over.
• Page speed and rendering on key templates.
• Robots rules and noindex tags that must be removed at launch.

Launch and after

On launch day we confirm redirects are live, submit updated sitemaps and watch crawl errors in Search Console.

For the weeks after, we compare traffic, rankings, enquiries and revenue against the baseline, page by page. Some movement is normal while Google re-processes a site. What we look for is anything that does not recover, so it can be fixed quickly rather than discovered months later.

Migrations for large product ranges and multi-brand groups are priced from $10,000 a month. See pricing, or read about ecommerce SEO if you are replatforming a store.