Guide
Migrating a website without losing SEO rankings
Search equity is revenue infrastructure. A migration that treats URLs, redirects and metadata as an afterthought is how firms lose the traffic they already earned.
The rebuild is approved. The rankings are not optional.
New business depends on being found. The current site is slow or unmaintainable, but it has years of indexed pages, inbound links and published insight. You will not sign off a migration that treats that as collateral.
What usually goes wrong
URLs change and nobody mapped them
A new information architecture is designed as if the old URLs did not exist. Redirects are written after launch, once traffic has already dropped.
Metadata and structured data are left behind
Titles, descriptions, canonicals and schema lived in the old theme. The new site ships without them, or with placeholders.
Tracking resets on the day you go live
Analytics, ads conversion and call tracking were never verified on staging. The first week of the new site is a reporting blackout.
What a careful migration involves
SEO work happens before cutover, on staging, against a written URL map. Rankings cannot be guaranteed. The avoidable causes of loss can be controlled.
- Full URL inventory from the live site, including parameters you actually use
- Redirect map written and tested before launch, not patched afterwards
- Metadata, canonicals, hreflang and structured data carried across and checked
- Internal links rebuilt to the new structure
- Analytics and conversion events verified on staging
What it costs to find out
The Headless Assessment produces the URL map, the SEO risks and the cutover plan. £1,500, fixed. That document is what a responsible rebuild starts from.
How we do this work
Modernise the presentation layer and core functionalities without ripping out commerce, CRM, or content systems that still work.
Platform migrationsRelated guides
- WordPress to Next.js migrationMove off a slow, plugin-heavy WordPress site without losing the content, rankings and integrations you already paid for.
- Website rebuild after a rebrandA rebrand is the moment the current site becomes indefensible. The mistake is treating the new site as a design job and leaving the platform, URLs and integrations as an afterthought.
Common questions
Can you guarantee we will keep our rankings?
No. Anyone who does is selling something they cannot control. We control redirects, metadata, internal links, structured data and tracking — the parts of a migration that most often cause avoidable loss.
What about Google Business Profiles and local pages?
Local URLs and location pages are treated as first-class. They are mapped, redirected and checked like the rest of the site, not folded into a generic service page.
When do redirects go live?
At cutover, as part of a sequenced release, after they have been tested on staging. Not as a spreadsheet emailed to whoever has DNS access on the day.
Find out what you are actually dealing with.
The Headless Assessment produces the URL map, the SEO risks and the cutover plan. £1,500, fixed. That document is what a responsible rebuild starts from.
No lock-in. No obligation.