A website migration - moving to a new platform, a new design, or a new domain - is one of the most common ways businesses accidentally torch their search rankings. Everything looks great on launch day, and then a few weeks later the traffic quietly falls off a cliff. The cause is almost always the unglamorous details nobody planned for.
Why rankings vanish in a migration
Search engines have spent years learning your old URLs and how much to trust each page. When those URLs change and nothing tells search engines where the content went, that trust is stranded on pages that no longer exist. Visitors hit dead ends, and your rankings follow.
A migration doesn't lose your SEO. Forgetting to redirect the old URLs loses your SEO.
The boring steps that save you
- Map every old URL to its new home before launch
- Set up proper redirects so old links carry their value across
- Preserve page titles, headings and metadata that were working
- Keep an eye on broken links and fix them quickly
- Watch search performance closely in the weeks after launch
None of this is exciting. All of it is the difference between a smooth move and months of lost ground.
Clean up on the way through
A migration is also a chance to fix what was broken - orphaned images, messy formatting, dead links - so you arrive tidier than you left. That care is part of our Content Management service: we migrate and clean up content so you keep your rankings and lose the clutter.
If you've got a move on the horizon, planning the migration properly is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy. We're happy to help you get it right.