Migrations done without losing what you've built.
Website migrations are one of the highest-risk events in SEO. Done well, they're invisible — traffic holds, rankings transfer, nothing breaks. Done badly, they take years to recover from. The difference is almost always in the preparation, and almost always in how early SEO is involved.
Why migrations go wrong
Most migration failures aren't caused by the redirect mapping or the sitemap — they're caused by SEO being brought in too late, or treated as a checklist rather than a discipline. By the time a dev team has already built the new site structure, the decisions that matter most have already been made. URL architecture, content consolidation, crawl logic — these can't be retrofitted. I've been involved in migrations across enterprise retail, SaaS platforms, and multi-market brands. I work best when I'm in from the start.
What I cover
Migration planning
Building the full SEO migration plan before a line of code is written — risk assessment, timelines, sign-off criteria, and a clear brief for the dev team. The planning phase is where migrations are won or lost.
URL architecture & redirect mapping
Comprehensive redirect mapping at scale, with logic for handling URL patterns, parameter changes, and content consolidations — not just a one-to-one list. Including the equity flow decisions that most redirect specs don't document.
Pre-launch audit
Staging environment review covering crawlability, indexation signals, redirect chains, canonical setup, hreflang (for international sites), and the technical elements that need to be right before go-live — with a clear sign-off checklist the team can work through.
Post-launch monitoring
The weeks after launch are critical. Monitoring for unexpected drops, crawl anomalies, redirect failures, and indexation issues — with rapid response when something goes wrong. Most migration problems surface in the first 30 days.
Traffic recovery
When a migration has already gone wrong — diagnosing what happened, identifying what can and can't be recovered, and executing a systematic recovery plan. Not all traffic comes back, but most of it can with the right approach.
CMS & platform migrations
Migrating between platforms — WordPress to custom, Magento to Shopify, monolith to headless — with the full SEO implications of each transition understood and mitigated from the start. Platform choices have long-term SEO consequences that need to be surfaced before the decision is made.
"A migration checklist is not a migration strategy. I've seen sites lose 60% of their traffic to migrations that passed every standard pre-launch check. The work that matters happens long before anyone touches staging — URL architecture, equity flow, crawl logic, consolidation decisions. Get those right and the checklist takes care of itself."
Ryan White · Manchester
Who this is for
- Brands planning a replatform, redesign, or domain change
- Sites mid-migration who need urgent SEO oversight
- Teams dealing with post-migration traffic loss and no clear recovery plan
- Agencies managing a complex migration for a key client
From the blog
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