Website Migration & Redesign SEO Services

What migration SEO protects

A website’s rankings live in its URLs. Every page that ranks has a history of links, indexed content and user signals attached to its address, and a redesign that changes the address, the content or the internal links without a plan throws that history away. SEO for a website redesign or migration, within my SEO services, is the work of carrying that history over: deciding what happens to every existing URL, redirecting each changed one to its exact new equivalent, keeping the content and links that earned the rankings, and checking before and after launch that Google sees what you intended. Done properly, a migration is invisible to search. Done badly, it costs months of traffic, which is then the subject of the traffic drop recovery service.

Who this is for

• Businesses redesigning their site with an agency or developer who has not mentioned redirects.
• Companies changing domain after a rebrand or a merger.
• Stores moving between platforms (WooCommerce to Shopify, custom to Magento, or the reverse).
• Sites moving from HTTP to HTTPS, consolidating several domains, or changing URL structure and language folders.
• Teams whose previous launch lost traffic and who want the next one to go differently.

What the migration SEO service includes

• Baseline. A full crawl of the existing site, an export of every URL with its traffic, rankings, links and indexation status, and a record of current positions, so that losses can be seen immediately rather than guessed at months later.
• Classification. Every existing URL is marked keep, improve, rewrite, merge, redirect or remove, with the pages that rank and earn links protected: same URL where possible, same topic, same intent, same or better content, same internal links.
• URL map. A one-to-one map from every old URL to its new destination, including images, PDFs and old redirect chains that still carry links. No mass redirect to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404.
• Redirect implementation and testing. 301 rules written for your server or platform, tested on staging against the full old URL list, with chains and loops removed.
• Content and template parity. Titles, headings, body copy, canonicals, meta robots, structured data, hreflang and internal links checked template by template on staging against the live site, with the specific checks from my technical SEO service.
• Staging protection. The staging site blocked from indexing and the block removed at launch, which is the step most often forgotten in both directions.
• Launch-day checklist. Redirects live, robots.txt and sitemaps updated, Search Console change-of-address filed for domain moves, analytics and conversion tracking verified, priority URLs submitted for indexing.
• Post-launch monitoring. Daily crawl and Search Console checks for the first two weeks, weekly for two months, with rankings and traffic compared to the baseline and fixes applied as issues appear.

How a migration runs

1. Scope call. What is changing (domain, platform, design, URLs, content, language structure), who is building it, and when it launches. The earlier I am involved, the cheaper the protection; the ideal point is before the new URL structure is decided.
2. Baseline and classification. Two to five working days depending on site size, producing the URL inventory and the keep, improve, merge and redirect decisions.
3. Structure review. The proposed new sitemap and URL rules reviewed against the keyword map so that ranking pages keep their targets and no two new pages compete for one term.
4. URL map and redirect rules. Delivered as a spreadsheet and as implementation-ready rules for the developer or platform.
5. Staging audit. Full crawl of the staging site, template parity checks, redirect testing against the old URL list, speed comparison, and a list of blockers that must be fixed before launch.
6. Launch. I am available during the launch window to run the checklist and catch problems within hours rather than weeks.
7. Monitoring and report. A migration report after eight weeks comparing traffic, rankings and indexation with the baseline, and a list of any remaining fixes.

Plan for two to four weeks of SEO work around a typical business site migration, spread across the build; large stores and multi-language sites take longer. Domain changes need extra time for Google to process the change of address, which is why they are best done outside your peak season.

Migration mistakes I am called in to repair

• Every old URL redirected to the homepage.
• The new design dropping the content that ranked (a 1,200-word service page replaced by three lines and an icon).
• Staging robots.txt “Disallow: /” copied to the live site at launch, or the staging site left indexable and outranking the live one.
• A JavaScript rebuild where the HTML response no longer contains the content Google used to index.
• Image and PDF URLs, which often carry links, forgotten entirely.
• Tracking not reinstalled, so nobody notices the enquiries have stopped.
• In Nepal specifically: a new site delivered by a developer with a new domain because the old one was registered in someone else’s name, with no redirect from the old domain at all.

What you receive

• The URL inventory and classification.
• The old-to-new URL map and the redirect rules.
• The staging audit and blocker list, and the launch-day checklist.
• The eight-week post-launch report against the baseline.

Migration SEO is priced as a project rather than a retainer, scoped after the first crawl; it is included at the Enterprise tier on the SEO packages and pricing page. If I am also building the new site, migration protection is part of the WordPress development service. Businesses about to change hosting rather than the site itself should read the hosting and website migration service, which covers the server side.

Next step

If a redesign or migration is planned, request a free pre-launch SEO check and tell me the launch date. I will review the current site’s ranking pages and the proposed structure and tell you what must be mapped before launch. If the site has already launched and traffic has dropped, say so and I will start with the diagnosis. All related work is under SEO services.