Web development

A new site, with your search rankings intact

The classic disaster in a website rebuild is losing half your traffic after launch, because thousands of old URLs became error pages. Migration is a redirect and monitoring project, not a content copy.

The plan

What we run in any migration

The steps that prevent losing traffic.

Before launch

  • A full inventory of every existing URL
  • Identifying the highest traffic and ranking pages
  • A redirect map from every old URL to a new one
  • Page titles and descriptions carried across intact
  • Redirects tested on a staging copy

After launch

  • Daily crawl error monitoring for two weeks
  • Tracking indexing in search console tools
  • Comparing traffic before and after, like for like
  • Fixing any broken link the moment it appears
  • A status report one month after launch

The opening decision

Sometimes improving what exists beats rebuilding

We always start by reviewing the current site and its code before recommending anything. If the foundation is sound and the problem is speed, design or content, fixing it is far cheaper and far less risky than a full rebuild. We say so even when the smaller project is worth less to us.

When a rebuild is justified

The current platform is unsupported or insecure
Every small edit needs a developer and days
Performance will not improve however it is tuned
A new language or section cannot be added
Hosting or licence costs are high for no reason
The URL structure itself blocks search visibility

Risks

Three things quietly lost in a migration

All hard to recover after launch.

External links

An old URL another site pointed at becomes an error page, losing a trust signal built over years.

Page titles and descriptions

Carrying them across preserves what search engines already know about each page; rewriting them starts from zero.

Measurement continuity

Breaking the link to your analytics costs you exactly the comparison you need right after launch.

Questions

About migration

Will we lose our search rankings?
Mild fluctuation in the first weeks is normal while search engines recrawl the site. Permanent loss only happens when redirects are neglected, which a complete map prevents.
How long does a migration take?
It depends on page count and content complexity. The inventory and redirect map are the longest part. The switch itself usually happens within a pre-agreed window of hours.
Does the site go down during the move?
We prepare the new site fully on staging and test it, then switch during a low-traffic window. Actual downtime is minutes rather than hours.

Start here

Tell us about your project

Send us two lines about what you need on WhatsApp. We reply, book a short scoping call, then send a written plan with cost and timeline before you commit to anything.