- Map
- Redirect
- Monitor
Website Migration SEO
Website migration SEO done properly — URL mapping, one-hop redirects, pre-launch testing and post-launch monitoring — so you replatform, redesign or change domain without losing the rankings you've spent years building. Planned and run by me, start to finish.
Migrations are where rankings go to die. Yours don't have to.
Every SEO has seen it: a business launches a beautiful new site and watches traffic fall off a cliff, because URLs changed without maps, redirects went in as chains, or the new build quietly broke indexation.
Migration SEO is the discipline of making sure that never happens — benchmarking everything before, controlling everything during, and monitoring everything after.
I've protected rankings through replatforms, redesigns and domain changes for 18+ years — the latest a large ecommerce store taken from Magento over to Shopify, launched in February 2026 and holding above its pre-migration benchmark. It's some of the highest-stakes work in SEO, and it's a core part of mine.
Migration types
Replatforming
Magento to Shopify, WooCommerce to Shopify, custom to anything — each combination has its own traps. Coming off Magento, for example, every URL on the site changes, and the category and filter pages that held your rankings need rethinking, not just redirecting. Knowing the traps in advance is the whole game.
Ecommerce ServicesDomain changes
Rebrands and domain moves, with the full Google site-move process: mapping, one-hop 301s, Search Console change of address, and monitoring until equity settles.
Redesigns
The nothing-changed-except-everything migration. Template, structure and rendering changes assessed before launch, not diagnosed after.
Consolidations
Merging sites or folding brands together without the usual authority bleed.
International restructures
Moving between ccTLDs, subfolders and subdomains with hreflang intact.
The process that protects you
Pre-migration crawl & benchmark
Full inventory of URLs, rankings, traffic and backlinks. You can't protect what you haven't measured.
URL mapping
Every old URL mapped to its single closest new equivalent. Never everything-to-homepage.
One-hop 301 strategy
Direct redirects, no chains — chains leak equity and patience.
Pre-launch testing
Redirects, canonicals, robots, sitemaps, rendering and templates verified on staging before anything goes live.
Launch-day checks
The critical first hours, watched live: redirects firing, crawl behaviour, index status.
Post-launch monitoring
Weeks of tracking until rankings and traffic settle — with fast intervention if anything drifts.
Migration Case Study
Frequently asked questions
Will we lose traffic during a migration?
A brief settling period is normal; a lasting loss is not. Done properly, most migrations stabilise at or above previous levels — the horror stories come from skipped steps.
When should you get involved?
Before the new site is built, ideally. The cheapest migration problems are the ones designed out; the most expensive are the ones found after launch. If you've already launched and traffic has dropped, I do rescue work too.
Can you work with our developers or agency?
That's the standard setup. I own the SEO plan and QA; they build. I speak developer fluently enough that nothing gets lost in translation.
Do you handle the redirects yourself?
I produce the complete mapping and rules, implement them where I have access, and verify them either way. Nothing ships unchecked.
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