Lower-risk domain changes, redesigns, and CMS replatforming

A migration project starts long before launch day. We inventory every URL that has value, decide where each one should live on the new site, and test the new build before it goes public. After launch we watch crawling, indexing and rankings closely so problems are caught while they are still small.

We work alongside your developers or web team rather than replacing them. Our role is to make sure search requirements are built in, not bolted on after something breaks.

Any change that alters URLs, content or how the site is rendered puts rankings at risk. That includes moving to a new domain or merging several domains, switching platforms such as WordPress to Shopify or a custom framework, restructuring categories or service pages, consolidating locations, and launching a redesign that rewrites or removes content.

The best time to bring in SEO is before design and development decisions are final. Late involvement often means redirects are written in a hurry, valuable pages are cut without anyone noticing, and the new site launches with staging settings still blocking search engines.

Redirecting every old URL to the homepage is one of the most damaging shortcuts in a migration. Search engines tend to treat mass redirects to irrelevant pages like soft 404s, so the signals those pages earned may not carry over. A 1:1 map sends each legacy URL to the most relevant new page with a permanent 301 redirect, which gives search engines and visitors the clearest path.

Our goal is that no URL with traffic, rankings or backlinks ends in a 404 after launch. We test the full matrix on staging, check for redirect chains and loops, and keep monitoring after launch to catch anything that slips through.

We treat a migration as a project with checkpoints. Discovery establishes a benchmark of current rankings, traffic and indexed pages, so we can measure the new site against it. Mapping and staging QA happen before any DNS change, and we hold a launch checklist with your team covering redirects, robots settings, sitemaps, analytics and tag tracking.

After launch we monitor daily at first, reviewing server logs or crawl data where available, Search Console coverage reports and rankings for priority pages. When issues appear, we flag them with specific fixes so your developers can act quickly.

Even well-run migrations can see some short-term ranking fluctuation while search engines recrawl and reprocess the site. Domain changes and major structural changes generally take longer to settle than a redesign that keeps URLs the same. How long that takes varies with the size of the site and how often it is crawled.

We cannot guarantee that rankings will not move, and anyone who does is overpromising. What careful planning does is remove the avoidable causes of loss and shorten the time it takes to stabilize. Our reporting compares post-launch performance against the pre-launch benchmark so you can see exactly where things stand.

Pricing depends on scope: the number of URLs, how much the structure is changing, whether domains are being merged, the platforms involved, and how long post-launch monitoring should run. A small brochure site redesign is a much lighter project than a large eCommerce replatform. We scope migrations after an initial review, and our pricing page explains how project work is structured.