Website migration and replatforming — a new site that keeps the rankings you earned

The new site launches on a Thursday. It looks better than the old one, everyone says so, and the invoice gets paid. Six weeks later inquiries have quietly halved. Nothing appears broken. What broke is invisible: the URLs Google ranked for years now return 404s, the redirect map was never built, and the titles and internal links that carried those rankings were rewritten by someone who did not know they were load-bearing.

That risk goes unmentioned in most redesign pitches, because mentioning it makes the project sound harder. It is also the most expensive thing that can happen to a business online: years of search equity undone in a single launch.

We treat replatforming as an SEO project that happens to include a new website.

What migration means in our hands

We crawl before we design. The first deliverable is not a mockup. It is a full inventory of the existing site: every URL, which ones earn traffic and rankings, which ones have external links, and which ones convert. That inventory decides what has to survive the move, so a rebuild never quietly drops pages nobody checked.

The redirect map is a document you sign off. Every old URL is mapped to its new home before launch. One hop, no chains, no lazy blanket redirect to the homepage. Pages that already rank keep their titles, headings, schema, canonical tags and internal links unless there is a reason to, and then it is a decision rather than an accident.

Launch is a sequence, with a way back. DNS TTLs lowered in advance, staging kept out of the index, redirects tested against the live crawl, analytics and Search Console verified before the switch. The old site stays reachable until the new one is confirmed good, so a bad surprise means a same-day rollback instead of a week of damage.

What a typical engagement includes

• Full crawl of the current site, plus a ranking, traffic and backlink baseline
• Content and media migration, including the pages your team forgot existed
• Data migration: products, customers, order history, form submissions, blog archives, accounts
• URL mapping and a redirect plan you approve before anything ships
• On-page SEO preserved where it performs: titles, meta, headings, schema, internal links
• Rebuild on a modern stack, to our standard Lighthouse 95+ and WCAG 2.1 AA
• Pre-launch QA: staging crawl, broken link sweep, redirect testing, analytics parity
• A launch runbook with DNS steps, cutover order and a documented rollback
• Post-launch monitoring: Search Console coverage, ranking movement, 404 logs, server errors
• Handover: admin access, documentation, and the redirect map itself

The approach and the stack

We move businesses off Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy site builder, aging Shopify themes, legacy WordPress carrying a decade of plugin sprawl, and custom builds whose developer is long gone. Where you land depends on what you sell: Next.js on Vercel with a self-serve admin for content sites and webapps, Shopify or WooCommerce for ecommerce.

Monitoring runs for weeks after launch, not hours: rankings, crawl errors and 404 hits watched daily at first, so anything that moves gets fixed while the cause is obvious.

What this looks like in practice

Two typical engagement shapes:

Off a website builder, onto something you own. A business has outgrown Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy: slow on mobile, no control over the markup, thin SEO, no way to add the booking flow it now needs. Content and archives move, every URL is mapped, and the result is faster and finally extensible. Usually paired with a web design engagement.

A legacy site with real search equity at stake. Thousands of URLs, years of rankings, a plugin stack that is now a security liability, and a business that cannot afford a dip. This runs in phases: crawl and baseline, redirect plan, rebuild, staged launch, then weeks of monitoring. Large sites migrate section by section rather than all at once.

Pricing

Migrations are scoped per project. URL count, data volume, platform quirks and how much of the old site is worth keeping decide the effort. We look first, then quote a fixed price for a defined scope. Contact us for a quote.

Before you approve that redesign

Send us the URL. Within four business hours we will tell you what you stand to lose and what it takes to keep it. A free audit is cheap insurance, and a care plan keeps the new site healthy after launch.

Start a migration or book a 30-min call