Replatform, redesign, or rebrand without watching your rankings disappear
A migration is the single most dangerous thing you can do to a website that's already working. New platform, new URLs, new templates, and if any one of the thousands of moving parts is handled wrong, the traffic you spent years earning evaporates in a single deploy. The worst part is you often don't feel it for weeks, by which point the damage is already baked in. Most agencies treat migration as a design project. We treat it as an engineering operation with your search equity as the payload.
Every URL on your current site is a small deposit of trust that Google has built up over time: the links pointing at it, the rankings it holds, the history it carries. A migration moves the whole building, and if you don't carry that trust across cleanly, Google treats your new pages as strangers. Broken redirects, dropped content, changed URL patterns, missing metadata, slower templates, each one quietly cuts a wire between your old equity and your new site.
The reason migrations fail so often isn't that they're impossible to do safely. It's that they're usually run by people focused on how the new site looks, with SEO bolted on at the end as a checklist item, if at all. Nobody inventories the old URLs. Nobody maps the redirects one to one. Nobody QAs the staging site against a technical standard before the switch is flipped. So the site launches, looks beautiful, and starts bleeding.
Done with discipline, a migration is completely survivable, and it's often the moment your rankings actually improve, because a faster, cleaner, better-structured site is exactly what Google wants to rank. The difference between those two outcomes is entirely process. That process, run by the same engineers who write the code, is what we do.
The redirect map is the spine of the entire migration. Before anything moves, we crawl the current site and pull every indexed and linked URL, including the ones nobody remembers exist, and map each to its exact destination on the new site. Not a lazy blanket redirect to the homepage, which throws away the equity; a real 1:1 map so every page's trust lands where it belongs.
Platform migrations are where content quietly disappears: a field that didn't map, a content type the new CMS doesn't have, product data truncated in export. We inventory everything on the old site, map it to the new data model, and reconcile the counts on both sides so nothing goes missing. For e-commerce and databases, we treat product, order, and customer data with the same rigor as the URLs.
Nothing launches until it has passed QA on a staging environment against a full technical checklist. We test the new templates for crawlability, speed, and schema, walk the redirect map to confirm every source lands on the right target, and check that the staging site is blocked from indexing so Google never sees the half-built version. The go-live is boring on purpose.
The migration isn't done at launch, it's done when Google has fully re-crawled, re-indexed, and settled. We re-crawl the live site immediately to catch anything that slipped, monitor Search Console for coverage errors and indexation drops, and track rankings and traffic day by day so any problem is caught in hours, not the month it takes for a report to surface it.
We move sites between platforms without torching rankings or losing data.
A migration is only as safe as its inventory. We crawl the current site, pull historical URLs from analytics and Search Console, and audit the backlink profile so we know exactly what equity is on the line and which pages matter most.
Every indexed, linked, and historically ranking URL on the current site.
Backlinks and top pages identified so nothing high-value gets lost.
What exists now, mapped to what the new platform will hold.
This is where migrations are won or lost. We map every old URL to its new destination one to one, plan the content and data move, and write the step-by-step runbook, including the rollback path, before anyone touches production.
Every source URL matched to its exact target, no blanket redirects.
Content, products, and media mapped to the new data model.
Ordered cutover steps with a rollback plan if anything goes wrong.
The new site gets built and populated on a staging environment that Google can't see. We migrate the content and data, reconcile the counts, and QA the whole thing against a technical checklist until it passes clean.
Migrated and reconciled so nothing is silently dropped.
Speed, mobile, schema, and crawlability tested before launch.
The full map walked end to end against the staging build.
Go-live follows the runbook, then the real work starts: an immediate re-crawl, Search Console monitoring, and daily ranking tracking through the settling period so any issue is caught and fixed in hours.
Launch by the runbook, redirects and indexing verified live.
The live site crawled at once to catch anything that slipped.
Daily monitoring until Google has fully re-indexed and stabilized.
Most agencies hand you a redesign and hope the rankings survive. We run the migration as an engineering operation, full URL inventory, 1:1 redirect mapping, staging QA, and day-one monitoring, because we build the site and protect the search equity in the same hands. When something slips post-launch, we don't email you a ticket. We fix it in the code, same day.
Talk to an engineer →Store migrations carry the most moving parts: thousands of product and category URLs, live inventory, customer accounts, and order history all have to survive the move at once.
We map every product and category URL 1:1, migrate catalog and inventory data with row-count reconciliation, preserve Product and Review schema so rich results don't reset, and keep redirects clean so seasonal best-sellers don't lose their rankings mid-move.
Learn more →News and content sites live on huge archives, years of articles, each with links and rankings, where a botched migration can orphan tens of thousands of URLs overnight.
We inventory the full archive including deep, older URLs, map redirects at scale, preserve Article schema and author markup, and monitor indexation closely so the long tail of archived content keeps earning traffic after the switch.
Learn more →SaaS replatforms often move to JavaScript frameworks and restructure docs and marketing pages, where rendering issues and changed URL patterns can quietly de-index whole sections.
We verify the new framework renders content Google can index, map docs and programmatic URLs one to one, preserve canonical and structured data, and QA templates on staging so a modern stack doesn't come at the cost of crawlability.
Learn more →For multi-location brands, a migration threatens the location-page architecture and NAP consistency that local rankings and map presence depend on.
We preserve every location URL, keep LocalBusiness schema and NAP data consistent across the move, maintain internal linking between market pages, and monitor local rankings so no branch drops out of its city's results.
Learn more →Law firms, accountants, and agencies carry libraries of practice-area and bio pages whose rankings and referral links are the whole point of the site.
We map every practice-area and attorney URL 1:1, carry titles, metadata, and schema across intact, protect the backlink equity pointing at key pages, and verify post-launch that the pages that drive leads still rank where they did.
Learn more →Rebrands and domain consolidations after an acquisition are the highest-risk migration of all: you're often merging or moving entire domains and their combined equity.
We plan cross-domain redirects that transfer authority to the surviving domain, consolidate duplicate content without cannibalization, preserve the strongest URLs' backlinks, and monitor both properties until the equity has fully migrated and settled.
Learn more →Every old URL matched 1:1 to its new home, the document that keeps your rankings from falling through the cracks.
The ordered cutover plan, staging QA sign-off, and rollback path, so go-live is boring and controlled, not a gamble.
Re-crawled and confirmed after launch, with content and data reconciled so nothing went missing in the move.
Search Console and ranking data through the weeks that decide the outcome, with any issue caught and fixed fast.
Not if it's done right. Ranking loss in a migration comes from specific, preventable mistakes: missing redirects, blanket redirects to the homepage, dropped content, or slower templates. We inventory every URL, map redirects one to one, QA on staging, and monitor after launch precisely so those failures never happen. A clean migration usually holds rankings, and often improves them because the new site is faster and better structured than the one it replaced.
Two things. First, an incomplete or lazy redirect map, where someone points all the old URLs at the homepage, which throws away the equity each page had earned. Second, nobody notices for weeks because there's no post-launch monitoring, so the damage is baked in before anyone reacts. Our whole process is built to eliminate both: a real 1:1 map, and daily monitoring through the settling period.
It depends on the size and complexity of the site. A small business site is a different scope than a 50,000-URL e-commerce store or a decade-deep publisher archive. The build and QA phase is where most of the time goes, because we won't cut over until staging passes a full technical checklist. We scope the timeline honestly up front and never rush the launch to hit a date at the expense of your rankings.
Yes. URL redirects are only half the job. We migrate the actual content, products, media, and structured data into the new platform, map it to the new CMS data model, and reconcile the counts on both sides so nothing is silently dropped. For e-commerce, that includes catalog, inventory, and the data your store depends on to function on day one.
That's exactly why we monitor. We re-crawl the live site immediately, watch Search Console for coverage and indexation issues, and track rankings daily through the settling period. Because we're the engineers who built and moved the site, anything that surfaces gets fixed in the code the same day, not written up as a recommendation for you to chase a developer about.
A migration is actually a good moment to fix technical and structural problems, since you're rebuilding anyway: cleaner architecture, faster templates, better schema. But we change things deliberately and one layer at a time, with the redirect map and monitoring in place, so improvements are additive and never confused with migration risk. The goal is to move safely first, then let the better foundation pay off.
Book a consultation and we'll walk through your current site, the platform you're moving to, and exactly how we'll carry your rankings, content, and data across intact, with a redirect map, a launch runbook, and post-launch monitoring, all handled by the same engineers who build it.
